Humans are a walking species. We tread on the surface of the Earth. Without this primary mobility we would not be here and even when other means of getting around have become accessible, we don’t cease to walk. Our walking leaves traces. This is inevitable. No culture or civilisation or society can escape from this primordial mark-making. Some of these traces cluster and congregate into patte…
Biocultural diversity refers to the dynamic interrelationship between the Earth’sbiological, cultural and linguistic diversity (Maffi2007). Proponents of the conceptespouse an ‘inextricable’ link between these three forms of diversity, drawing oninsights mostly from anthropology, ethnobiology, ethnoecology and human ecology (Maffi2005,2007; Posey1999). Biocultural diversity draws strength…
Have the people of Africa always starved? Most people have never heard this question posed. So ingrained is the idea of “Africa” as a scarce place that the con-tinent has become synonymous with need in popular thought.1 Preoccupied by images of hungry children and drought-ravaged landscapes, we have come to expect that we will find food insecurity in every…
Knowledge has been the focal concept in this book series. Beyond the many con-ceptualizations of and ascriptions to this term, knowledge denotes the human under-standing of concrete and abstract phenomena of the world in which we live. Human understanding differs from data and information in that it is built and rests in peo-ple’s minds. Whereas bits of data or parcels of commodity …
For the Maya, the landscape in which they live, the k’aax (forest), has a moral ecology. It is the place where they feel “at home in the world,” where they are situated in an everyday engagement with their environment. It is also where their history, identity, spiritual beliefs, communion with other species, and ulti-mately their survival are rooted. The ethnic boundary that t…
The world is rapidly urbanizing. With around 55 per cent of the world’s 7.63 billion people living in urban areas (United Nations, 2019) we are facing conditions of “planetary urbanism” (Friedmann, 2016) and “planetary urbanization” (Brenner & Schmid, 2012; Swyngedouw & Kaika, 2014). The global urban population is expected to grow by 2.5 billion between 2018 and…
Beaver. Moose. Caribou. Think “animal” in Canada, and these and other iconic creatures of the Canadian wilderness are sure to come first to mind. Yet Canada has become increasingly urban since Confederation, to the extent that more than 80 per cent of the population today is considered to live in an urban setting.1 That urban identity has shaped profoundly…
Ecological Democracy offers an original, thought-provoking, and engaging treatment of why and how democracy should be re-imagined in reaction to today’s ecological crisis. The book explains that one need to re-imagine both the view on nature and democratic ideals within the same framework in the Anthropocene, the present geological epoch of human-made instability in the Earth system and its p…
The book series on Knowledge and Space explores the nature of human knowledge from a geographical perspective. How to create, share, and adopt new knowledge is a core question in the social sciences. Processes of learning and knowledge creation are the result of social practice and always take place in space and in specific geo-graphical contexts. The eleventh volume is the outcome of the sympo…
My first discussions of collective narcissism took place in Philadelphia during the Summer Institute of the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict at University of Pennsylvania in 2005. The Institute brought together scholars and practitioners of conflict resolution, civic servants, and activists in this field to discuss the dynamics of escalation and de-escalation of ethno-n…