Risk, Environment and Modernity: Towards a New Ecology [Paperback]

This wide-ranging and accessible contribution to the study of risk, ecology and environment helps us to understand the politics of ecology and the place of social theory in making sense of environmental issues. The book provides insights into the complex dynamics of change in `risk societies'.This wide-ranging and accessible contribution to the study of risk, ecology and environment helps us to understand the politics of ecology and the place of social theory in making sense of environmental issues. The book provides insights into the complex dynamics of change in `risk societies'.`This is the strongest edited collection on the relationship between modernity, risk and the environment to be published to date and it deserves a place on the book shelf of every one who takes these issues seriously. Perhaps more importantly this book needs to be read by everyone who thinks that existing responses will ultimately solve the environmental problem . The editors present the collection as a slow manifesto capable of transforming the reductionism and realism they see dominating both natural and social scientific approaches to the environment. In twelve essays, organised into three sections, considerable progress is made towards this ambitious goal. The terrain transversed in the process is intellectually stimulating and demanding but amongst it lie some of the clearest renditions of complex positions currently available.... the overall standard is so consistently high. The reader is provided with an extremely lucid and coherent guide to the terrain covered in the introduction... Summarising the overall argument of a book like this in a short review is inevitably hazardous but I would identify three main themes which are sustained throughout. First, there is a central recognition that empiricism can only provide society with data which in and of itself is no guide to action. Second, the production and interpretation of data is seen as inescapably tied to the normative judgemel“M