What gets left behind for future generations? Reproduction and the environment in Spey Bay, Scotland

This chapter examines how conceptions of the environment and the state of the natural world are implicated in people's ideas about parenthood, fertility, and future generations. It carries the theme of the stable environment out into the wider world by considering what it means to care about stabilizing the natural environment in the interest of future generations. It also discusses the importance of reproduction—in humans and other parts of the natural world—in caring for the environment and working to prevent climate change. The chapter analyzes the concerns that the people of Spey Bay had about humans putting ourselves at risk of endangerment by destroying our natural environments and becoming overreliant on technology to create children. Finally, it looks at the salience of nature and naturalness to how people in Spey Bay think about reproduction, ethics, the future, and the environment.

This chapter examines people's ideas about good parenting by focusing on how those who do not have children plan for parenthood by creating a stable environment for their future children. The people of Spey Bay shared the sense that future generations will inherit the environments that they create. This is encapsulated, in a practical sense, by their assumption that parental responsibility begins with planning and creating a “stable environment” for children to be born into. This chapter considers the plans for future parenthood of those staff members who did not have children, both of which can be seen as forms of ethical labor. It also analyzes the connection between career aspirations and planning for parenthood by tracing the relationship between the professional and parental ethics of the people with no children who live and work in Spey Bay. Finally, it discusses charity work alongside women's aspirations for future motherhood.

A Return to the Commons: An Eco-Marxist Reading of Jewett's “The Gray Mills of Farley” and Rebecca Harding Davis’ <i>Life in the Iron Mills</i>

Environmental discourses have now become a prime concern of all ecological activists, policy planners as well as the politicians. Environmental issues were seriously debated and discussed by scholars within the domain of International Relations (IR) with the passage of ‘The Limits to Growth’ thesis of 1972. In 1987, the concept of Sustainable Development got a concrete shape when it was put forward by the so-called Bruntland Commission Report. Sustainable Development emphasizes on the development needs of not only for the present generation, but also future generations. Subsequently, this became the focal point and basis of all further debates on environmental protection and conservation in international conferences. These discussions on ecological justice led to the proliferation of many environmental movements in India. The ‘Narmada Bachao Andolan’, the ‘Chipko Movement’ and the ‘Chilika Bachao Andolan’ are the three of the prominent ecological movements launched in independent India to safeguard the Earth. This paper seeks to understand and analyze what, how and when these environmental issues and movements propelled the growth of a nascent and indigenous ecological justice movement in India in the 21st century. It also probes into the debate between ‘modernists’ and ‘ecoradicals’ as well as the debate between ‘deep ecology’ and ‘shallow ecology’ in the quest for ecological justice.

Time to turn over a new leaf

Environmentalists engage many causes. They work on behalf human rights, poverty alleviation, and democracy as well as endangered species, a stable climate, and clean air, water, and soil. Amidst these diverse efforts, environmentalists maintain a fundamental commitment to nature. They see their job, to one degree or another, as standing up for the conservation, preservation, and sustainability of the nonhuman world. This dimension of environmentalism finds its roots in the West, especially Britain and the United States, 1 but has since become part of almost every social expression of environmental concern. Today, even the most human-centered environmental organizations—those focused on, for example, environmental justice, sustainable development, and industrial ecology— concentrate on nature insofar as they see a healthy natural world as a prerequisite for human well-being or a medium through which injustices are perpetrated. Indeed, since environmentalism’s beginnings in the nineteenth century, when people began worrying about industrialization despoiling rural and wild landscapes, to contemporary efforts to address climate change, freshwater scarcity, and loss of biological diversity, a central strand of environmentalism has prized the natural world and worked to protect it. The point of departure for this article is that the assumption behind the movement’s defense of nature is no longer valid and that continuing to subscribe to it compromises the promise of global environmentalism. The effort to defend or otherwise protect nature from humans assumes a distinction between the two. It supposes a domain that is essentially “human” and another that is fundamentally “nature.” Over the past few decades, ecological events and human understandings have proven this supposition erroneous. Today, humans draw so many resources from deep within and across the earth, and emit such incalculable amounts of waste into the air, water, and soil that, as McKibben famously

Histories of the environmental movement have emphasized the importance of a shift in focus from those issues traditionally associated with the movement, such as resource and wildlife protection, towards “new” quality of life issues, such as environmental pollution and its human health effects. Here, time‐series data between 1970 and 2000 on the issue agendas of fifty leading environmental movement organizations (EMOs) are used to empirically assess the veracity of this hypothesized shift. Results indicate that while there is dramatic growth in the salience of new environmental issues, those issues traditionally associated with the environmental movement continue to dominate the collective agendas of major EMOs. Further, new environmental issues are most likely to be represented in organizational fields composed of smaller EMOs on average.

This essay analyses two novels that explore reproductive scenarios which may be implemented in the near future: human germline genome editing and in vitro gametogenesis (IVG), dramatised in Eve Smith's Off-Target (2022) and Kira Peikoff's Baby X (2024), respectively.Smith's Off Target considers the plethora of medical, ethical, social and familial implications of germline editing, which is used to modify an embryo's genome and enhance it with traits deemed optimal that will be passed on to future generations, in this way effectively creating designer babies and radically interfering with the laws of evolution and genetic inheritance. The novel deals with the potential unintended consequences of genetic engineering, in particular CRISPR/Cas9. Genetic edits, if insufficiently tested, can have off-target effects, alluded to in the name of the novel. Peikoff's Baby X takes the premise of Off Target a step further by introducing IVG, exploring the multiple ramifications of this as yet undeveloped reproductive technology which would radically change the reproductive landscape as we know it.Meanwhile, the science that will enable germline editing and IVG is advancing rapidly, making it imperative to consider the far-reaching repercussions of these technologies, not only in medical terms but specifically with regard to ethical implications for families and society in general. These novels are powerful reminders that the debate about the future applications of genome editing and IVG needs to happen now. The issues raised by the novels will be analysed mainly through a gender studies and bioethics lens.

Roderick Nash's classic study of changing attitudes toward wilderness during American history, as well as the origins of the environmental and conservation movements, has received wide acclaim since its initial publication in 1967. The Los Angeles Times listed it among the one hundred most influential published in the last quarter century, Outside Magazine included it in a survey of books that changed our world, and it has been called the Book of Genesis for environmentalists. For the fifth edition, Nash has written a new preface and epilogue that brings Wilderness and the American Mind into dialogue with contemporary debates about wilderness. Char Miller's foreword provides a twenty-first-century perspective on how the environmental movement has changed, including the ways in which contemporary scholars are reimagining the dynamic relationship between the natural world and the built environment.

“The Book of Genesis for conservationists”—Dave Foreman Roderick Nash’s classic study of changing attitudes toward wilderness during American history, as well as the origins of the environmental and conservation movements, has received wide acclaim since its initial publication in 1967. The Los Angeles Times listed it among the one hundred most influential books published in the last quarter century, Outside Magazine included it in a survey of “books that changed our world,” and it has been called the “Book of Genesis for environmentalists.” For the fifth edition, Nash has written a new preface and epilogue that brings Wilderness and the American Mind into dialogue with contemporary debates about wilderness. Char Miller’s foreword provides a twenty-first-century perspective on how the environmental movement has changed, including the ways in which contemporary scholars are reimagining the dynamic relationship between the natural world and the built environment.

Re-defining Sustainability: Living in Harmony with Life on Earth

The Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway was one of the most expensive and controversial public works ventures of the last twenty-five years. In this monumental history of the nation's largest navigation project, Jeffrey K Stine records the struggle between the interests determined to build the waterway and the forces pitted against its completion, a drama played out within congress and the federal courts, on the front pages of newspapers, and through the hilly countryside separating the Tennessee and the Tombigbee rivers. First authorised in the 1940's, the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway was championed by local boosters along its proposed route and by their supporters in Congress, despite its questionable economic benefits and its substantial environmental consequences. The Waterway, built between 1972 and 1985, was the most extensive domestic project ever undertaken by the Army Corps of Engineers, its 234 miles, five dams and ten locks entailing the movement of more earth than was required to dig the Panama Canal. Arrayed against the Waterway were scientists, politicians, and civic leaders disturbed by the social, environmental, and economic effects of this massive construction project. The fight over the Tenn-Tom helped to set the terms of the environmental debate reflected today in American society: the tension between development and preservation, between special interests and the national interest, between the advances of technology and the retreat of the natural world. Based on extensive research, Mixing the Waters pulls together for the first time the complete story of the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, a period of profound changes in American life, with increased scrutiny of governmental policies and actions, greater accountability of federal agencies and corporate offices, and a critical shift in public attitudes and values concerning quality of life issues. By exploring the intersection of U.S. politics, technological progress, and the environmental movement, Jeffrey K Stine has shown how this controversy over a public works project still influences the way America argues about its future.

For early man, little of the natural world was valuable. The few natural things that were useful were abundant, and therefore undemanding. Now, thanks to technology, far more of the natural world is useful, but it must satisfy the demands of over six billion people. Abundance has been superseded by scarcity, not because the natural world has diminished but because we now know how to exploit it. The result, in the absence of effective rules, and in its various manifestations, is plunder. Some of the things we might think of as natural are already adequately protected. The fish in a fish farm, the trees planted in a private forest: these are managed within a framework of incentives that is compatible with social interests. But there are two major holes in the protective web, and too much is falling through them. One hole is created by bad governance, and the other by the limitations of good governance. In other words, one is created locally, by specific governments in the countries of the bottom billion and their management of natural assets, and the other is global and involves management of those assets beyond national boundaries. The nonrenewable natural assets in the territories of the bottom billion are seldom harnessed for the development of their societies. As a result, future generations may inherit a depleted natural world with little to show for it. The once-only chance of using assets to lift these societies out of poverty through harnessing them will have been missed. The governments of many of the poorest countries are insufficiently held to account by their citizens for the good management of the natural assets under their control. The international renewable natural assets, such as the fish of the high seas, are liable to be plundered to extinction, while the natural liabilities, such as carbon, are liable to accumulate. The fish will have been eaten, and the carbon emitted, predominantly by the citizens of the rich countries. Throughout this book I have been guided by the haunting question of what future generations will think of us.

This paper suggests that early twentieth-century representations of the pastoral were informed by late nineteenth-century environmentalism. Richard Jefferies, Victorian author and journalist, was one of the earliest proponents of an ecological movement that warned against humans losing connection with nature. Jefferies' spiritual autobiography, The Story of my Heart , published in 1883, attempted to defy the passive response to late-Victorian ecological ignorance and boldly anticipated the more dynamic literary forms of the Modernist era. Although Jefferies' expression of the relationship between the psyche and the natural world has been labelled as 'pantheistic', 'pretentious' and a 'failure', a similar strain of dramatic self-consciousness is recognisable in the work of early Modern authors. D. H. Lawrence stated that he 'didn't like' The Story of My Heart . However, close readings of passages from the autobiography, and from Jefferies' post-apocalyptic novel After London (1885) compared with close readings from Lawrence's The Rainbow (1915) highlight latent affinities between the late work of Jefferies and the work of D. H. Lawrence. These affinities include imaginative connections between the psyche and the natural world—which afforded partial consolation for the post-Romantic loss of equilibrium between man and nature, and the potential implications of ecological imbalance for the relationship between man and woman—in particular the struggle for individual identity within an increasingly industrial environment. Considering these affinities in the context of the broader literary transition between late-nineteenth century realism and the more reactionary genres of the early twentieth century, this paper concludes that continuity between late nineteenth-century environmentalism and early modernist ecological narratives afforded a more imaginative understanding of the relationship between the self and the natural world.

The waste problem in Tanjung Baru Village is not a disaster if waste management is managed properly. Good waste management must of course have good environmental management wisdom as well. Environmental wisdom can be seen from how humans treat; objects, plants, animals, and anything around them. This is what is then called ecological intelligence, namely how a person's understanding and knowledge are in understanding their environmental ecosystem, so that they can care about the environment they live in. Therefore, the village asked the PKM team of the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, Sriwijaya University to provide some kind of guidance to the people of Tanjung Baru Village in utilizing household waste. The low level of public understanding regarding the utilization of household waste causes household waste to be simply thrown away. Household waste processing that has not received the touch of processing technology. This can be seen from the absence of households that process household waste into useful processed products. Efforts to transfer information on household waste processing and utilization technology through this PkM activity have resulted in increasing the motivation and attraction of the community to carry out an environmental care movement by processing and utilizing the household waste produced. The people of Tanjung Baru Village have started to select organic and non-organic waste. Organic waste such as vegetables and leaves are processed into organic fertilizer, while leftover food is given to pets such as chickens and ducks. For non-organic waste, it is collected and sold to collectors of used goods and some are reused for home decorations, for example plastic bottles used as a medium for planting vegetables.