scholarly journals REDEEMED FROM THE EARTH? ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE AND SALVATION THEOLOGY IN AFRICAN CHRISTIANITY

Scriptura ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 111 (0) ◽  
pp. 348
Author(s):  
Ben-Willie Kwaku Golo
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Change ◽  
African Christianity ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Salvation Theology

scholarly journals A Clear Past and a Murky Future: Life in the Anthropocene on the Pampana River, Sierra Leone

Land ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Marcantonio ◽  
Agustin Fuentes
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Change ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Complex Adaptive Systems ◽  
Human Activities ◽  
Adaptive Systems ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Earth System ◽  
Sierra Leonean ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Complex Adaptive

The impacts of human activities on ecosystems are significantly increasing the rate of environmental change in the earth system, reshaping the global landscape. The rapid rate of environmental change is disrupting the ability of millions of people around the globe to live their everyday lives and maintain their human niche. Evidence suggests that we have entered (or created) a new epoch, the Anthropocene, which is defined as the period in which humans and human activities are the primary drivers of planetary change. The Anthropocene denotes a global shift, but it is the collective of local processes. This is our frame for investigating local accounts of human-caused disruptive environmental change in the Pampana River in Tonkolili District, Northern Province, Sierra Leone. Since the end of the Sierra Leonean civil war in 2002, the country has experienced a rapid increase in extractive industries, namely mining. We explored the effects of this development by working with communities along the Pampana River in Tonkolili, with a specific focus given to engaging local fishermen through ethnographic interviews (N = 21 fishermen and 33 non-fishermen), focus group discussions (N = 21 fishermen), and participant observation. We deployed theoretical and methodological frameworks from human niche construction theory, complex adaptive systems, and ethnography to track disruptive environmental change in and on the Pampana from upstream activities and the concomitant shifts in the local human niche. We highlight the value of integrating ethnographic methods with human evolutionary theory, produce important insights about local human coping processes with disruptive environmental change, and help to further account for and understand the ongoing global process of human modification of the earth system in the Anthropocene.

Environmental Security and Climate Change

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Dalby
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Environmental Change ◽  
Security Policy ◽  
Growth Failure ◽  
Environmental Security ◽  
Peace Building ◽  
Future Climate Change ◽  
Fragile States ◽  
Earth System ◽  
The Earth

Environmental security focuses on the ecological conditions necessary for sustainable development. It encompasses discussions of the relationships between environmental change and conflict as well as the larger global policy issues linking resources and international relations to the necessity for doing both development and security differently. Climate change has become an increasingly important part of the discussion as its consequences have become increasingly clear. What is not at all clear is in what circumstances climate change may turn out to be threat multiplier leading to conflict. Earth system science findings and the recognition of the scale of human transformations of nature in what is understood in the 21st century to be a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, now require environmental security to be thought of in terms of preventing the worst dangers of fragile states being unable to cope with the stresses caused by rapid environmental change or perhaps the economic disruptions caused by necessary transitions to a post fossil fueled economic system. But so far, at least, this focus on avoiding the worst consequences of future climate change has not displaced traditional policies of energy security that primarily ensure supplies of fossil fuels to power economic growth. Failure to make this transition will lead to further rapid disruptions of climate and add impetus to proposals to artificially intervene in the earth system using geoengineering techniques, which might in turn generate further conflicts from states with different interests in how the earth system is shaped in future. While the Paris Agreement on Climate Change recognized the urgency of tackling climate change, the topic has not become security policy priority for most states, nor yet for the United Nations, despite numerous policy efforts to securitize climate change and instigate emergency responses to deal with the issue. More optimistic interpretations of the future suggest possibilities of using environmental actions to facilitate peace building and a more constructive approach to shaping earth’s future.

scholarly journals Anthropocene Dynamics in the Prehistoric Pacific

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-146
Author(s):  
Thomas P. Leppard
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Change ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Physical Change ◽  
Earth Systems ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Face ◽  
Land Surfaces ◽  
Few Data ◽  
Degree Of Heterogeneity

How will human societies evolve in the face of the massive changes humans themselves are driving in the earth systems? Currently, few data exist with which to address this question. I argue that archaeological datasets from islands provide useful models for understanding long-term socioecological responses to large-scale environmental change, by virtue of their longitudinal dimension and their relative insulation from broader biophysical systems. Reviewing how colonizing humans initiated biological and physical change in the insular Pacific, I show that varied adaptations to this dynamism caused diversification in social and subsistence systems. This diversification shows considerable path dependency related to the degree of heterogeneity/homogeneity in the distribution of food resources. This suggests that the extent to which the Anthropocene modifies agroeconomic land surfaces toward or away from patchiness will have profound sociopolitical implications.

Social Movements as Problematic Agents of Global Environmental Change

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Yearley
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Environmental Change ◽  
Global Environmental Change ◽  
Social Movement Organizations ◽  
Environmental Groups ◽  
Intergovernmental Panel ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
Political Objective ◽  
Movement Organizations

By the end of the old millennium, social movement organizations (SMOs) had become the most popularly acclaimed and, in many respects, trusted agencies advocating global environmental change. They had won widespread public admiration because of their daring and heroic undertakings, because of the verve and symbolic acuity of their actions and because they seemed to be in the vanguard of environmental change. Of course, commentators noted that governments and inter-governmental agencies might have more power to set and influence environmental standards, that companies might be making the greatest impacts on the environment, that it was often scientists who identified possible environmental problems which were ‘off the radar’ of environmental groups, and that the daily consumer choices of the industrialized world’s massed citizens and commuters might outweigh their efforts. All the same, social movements represented the quintessential environmental actor. In cultural terms, environmental organizations stood for the environment in a way which the Environment Minister, the collected scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or Shell simply could not. Moreover, those movement organizations which focused on issue of global environmental change seemed particularly successful; in the late 1980s through to the early 1990s—around the time of the Earth Summit— they were rewarded with disproportionately rapid growth and cultural cachet (see McCormick 1991: 152–5 who cites Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) in this regard). And their market prominence within the NGO sector has largely continued. At the same time, social movements commanded the attention of social scientists and commentators. For one thing, social movements and the associated movement organizations appeared to confound expectations. Far from politics as usual, social movements indicated how successfully and how enduringly people could be organized—or organize themselves —around non-conventional political objectives. Standard economic and political theories did not anticipate that people ‘ought’ to mobilize so successfully around a diffuse political objective such as global environmental improvement.

Education on Global Climate and Environmental Change in University of China

2013 ◽  
Vol 838-841 ◽  
pp. 3195-3198
Author(s):  
Jian Cheng Kang ◽  
Xiaochen Su
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Environmental Change ◽  
Environmental Changes ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Earth System ◽  
Ecological Civilization ◽  
Environment Change ◽  
Climate And Environmental Change ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Normal University

Global Climate and Environmental Change is an international hot field. To enhance native awareness on climate change is one mission of "State Policy and Action on Climate Change 2009 in China". As an implement, a course on Global Climate and Environmental Change has been opened in Shanghai Normal University since 2005. The course includes three fields. In the first field, it is introduced on which problems and harms have been caused from Global Climate and Environmental Changes according to UNEP Year Books 2003~2013. In the second field, to introduce the Earth System and Climate-Environment Change. In the third part, the hot climate-environmental issues are analyzed and discussed. By joining this course, the students have understanding earth system science and global change. It helped students to set up the view of ecological civilization of the harmonious development between human and nature, inspire students responsibility to protect the earth. During past 8 year, there were 4 to 5 classes opening for different levels in Shanghai Normal University for each year, more than 1000 students joined the study in the course.

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