Venice in Environmental Peril?: Myth and Reality [Paperback]

Venice and its environment are perceived to be in peril due to rising sea levels, tourism, and modern development. Are these threats myths or reality? This book explores Venices environmental risks based on interviews with Venetian environmental campaigners and draws on the mythology of the Venetian Republic. Campaigners opinions about the mobile dams nearing completion to protect the city reveal that Venice now represents an environmentally-threatened retreat from modernity. This reputation has been established as sustainable development and climate change policies have risen to the top of political agendas in many cities and countries. The book investigates how environmentalism has been transformed from a theory underpinning counter-cultural movements to part of a dominant holistic culture in Western societies. Rather than constraining Venice in search of a mythical harmony with nature, this book offers a ten-point proposal to modernize the city while preserving its ancient heritage.Dominic Standish, Ph.D., is British and lectures for the University of Iowa at its CIMBA campus in the Venice region of Italy, where he has lived since 1997 (see www.dominicstandish.com for more information).

Venice is a glory of human achievement, and this book is the human-centered defense that the city deserves. Mick Hume, columnist for The Times (London)

&A groundbreaking book for understanding the politicization of the environment. Dr. Frank Furedi, Professor of Sociology, University of Kent at Canterbury

&In Venice its impossible to ignore the cases where the science has been affected by politics. Jane Da Mosto, co-author of The Science of Saving Venice

Standish has succeeded in locating the transforming history of Venice as metaphor for Western preoccupations and self-understanding - from the highest realization of mercantile politics and republican statehood through romance and degenerate decadence, to its contemporary invocation as a symbol lÓ2