Environment and Society. Paul Robbins
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The Prisoner’s Dilemma in game-theoretical terms. The best outcome, in the upper left, is also the least likely, since each player prefers to avoid the worst individual outcomes, in the upper right and lower left corners, leading to the worst collective outcome, in the lower right.
4.2 Irrigation systems are labyrinths of sluices, canals, and gates, which test the limits of people’s ability to cooperate in managing environmental goods. This example, from the village of Musha in the Nile Valley, shows the interrelationships of one private field to the next, tied together by the mutual need for water held communally.
4.3 A woman tending her herd in India. In many parts of the world the responsibility for using common property and the control over the rules of the commons are often split along lines of gender, class, or race, portending problems for management.
5.1 A sow’s “farrowing crate,” where she will remain for the 35 (or so) days her young are nursing. Crating is an economically efficient method of raising hogs, but is it wrong?.
5.2 (a + b) Hetch Hetchy Valley, undammed before 1914 (left), and today (right), now dammed to provide the city of San Francisco with a clean and reliable source of fresh water. The fate of this valley was debated between leaving it “wild” versus appropriating it for its direct human usefulness.
6.1 Voluntary/Involuntary–Common/Catastrophic: A matrix for explaining what people think is risky and why. Each axis describes the characteristic of a hazard that tends to lead people, however erroneously, to assume it is or is not risky.
6.2 Map of tribal lands and superfund sites.
7.1 The secret of surplus value, in a nutshell. By the same principle, the environment must be worked harder and underinvested in order to sustain surpluses. The artist, Fred Wright (1907–1984), made panel-cartoons and animated shorts for the United Electrical Workers Union throughout his career.
7.2 Schematic representation of the possible contradictions that capitalism produces and the social and environmental responses they engender, possibly leading the way to a more sustainable and transparent society.
8.1 Though Pacific Northwest forest is “Old Growth,” since many of its trees are more than 150 years old, many of these forests are quite young, have been highly disturbed, swept by fire, and impacted by human uses. In this sense, not all Old Growth Forest is “pristine”.
8.2 Pollen evidence from Morocco over 14,000 years. Despite the ongoing dominant discourse that post-Roman North Africa experienced “desertification” and loss of tree cover following “Arab Invasions,” pollen data show no significant decrease in tree pollen in the past thousand years.126
8.3 John Gast, “American Progress,” 1872. Lady Liberty brings light (and farmers, plowed fields, telegraph lines, trains, etc.) as she drives the darkness (including “Indians” and wild animals) out of the wilderness.
9.1 Percentage female interns, staff, and boards of all mainstream environmental organizations (adapted from Taylor 2014).
9.2 The diverse economies iceberg, featured on the website of the Community Economies Collective and the Community Economies Research Network.
9.3 An industrial worker with Phossy Jaw.
9.4 BabyLegs (below) compared to a more traditional trawling micro-plastics sensor. BabyLegs is usually made from pink baby tights that bob in the water, making it look like she is swimming.
10.1 Predicted surface of child blood lead level and ward-specific elevated water lead level after (post) water source change from Detroit-Supplied Lake Huron water to the Flint River: Flint, MI,
10.2 Correlations of class and race with plumbing poverty in the United States. Native communities in the West are especially impacted.
10.3 Hazardous waste and military facilities in Tooele County.
11.1 Carbon on Earth. A Gt is a gigaton, or a billion tons. Ninety-nine percent of carbon is contained in the Earth’s crust. Most of the flow of carbon is between the oceans, the atmosphere, and soils and plants.Modern industry has removed large quantities of carbon from the Earth’s crust and, through combustion, has released them into the atmosphere as CO2.
11.2 The Keeling curve: Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 since 1958. The overall trend is a steady upwards curve. Annual variability (smaller up and down oscillations) is a result of the seasons in the northern hemisphere; plants green up in the spring, taking CO2 out of the atmosphere, and die-off in the fall, re-releasing that carbon.
11.3 Atmospheric concentration of carbon. Over the past thousand years carbon in the atmosphere has hovered at around 280 parts per million. With the explosion of industrial activity starting in 1800, more parts of human activity depend on combustion of fossil fuels and atmospheric carbon has increased exponentially as a result.
11.4 Global average temperatures, sea level, and snow cover. Over precisely the period when there has been a radical increase in the emission by people of gases that are understood to trap heat in the atmosphere, global temperatures have risen steadily, sea levels have increased, and snow cover has declined.
11.5 Cartogram of carbon emissions. In this map, countries are shown with their apparent size proportional to their total annual emissions in
11.6 The strange logic of carbon offsets.
12.1 Sequoia sempervirens, the genus in the cypress family Cupressaceae.Sequoia National Park, California. Trees are some of the largest and longest-lived organisms around which human beings live. Their influence on human culture has been enormous.
12.2 Global deforestation rates.
12.3 Forest cover in France from 1500 to 2000. The pattern of decline and regrowth follows a notably “U-shaped” curve, which has been a key argument in favor of the so-called forest transition theory.
13.1 The gray wolf.
13.2 World map of countries with known gray wolf populations in
13.3 Estimated range of gray wolves in the contiguous United States.
13.4 Wolf management zones in Minnesota.
13.5 An early twentieth-century government wolf trapper.
14.1 The nuclear fuel chain.
14.2 World uranium production,
14.3 Colonial division of labor in the Navajo uranium mines. Denny Viles (third from left), executive with the Vanadium Corporation of America, in shirt, tie, and soft-sided hat; the other three men in the picture are hard-hatted Navajo mineworkers.
14.4 The Ranger Uranium mine and mill, Northern Territory, Australia.
15.1 The sleek, powerful, bluefin tuna. The bluefin are the largest of the tuna (the largest one ever caught weighed 1496 pounds).
15.2 Dolphin mortality at the hands of US fishing vessels using purse-seine tuna technology in the Eastern Tropical Pacific, 1960–
15.3 The “Medina panel,” one of a few technological and operational changes made by purse-seine tuna fishers in attempts to reduce dolphin mortality.
15.4 A label from a can of Alaska salmon bearing the Marine Stewardship Council stamp of approval. (MSC label blown up to show detail).
15.5 Does a tuna have rights? Mutilated tuna rest on pallets at a seafood wholesaler in Tokyo. The image accompanied a “treehugger.com” article about overfished tuna stocks. No mention was made of the tunas’ rights or their dignity being violated, either before or after catch.
16.1 Lead arsenate – most popular pesticide prior to DDT.
16.2 Map showing quantity of turfgrass across the United States.
16.3 The lawn chemical commodity and knowledge chain.
17.1 The Poland Spring “Spring House” in 1910. Like other naturally occurring springs, these water sources had become elite destinations in the 1800s. Markets for their waters were associated