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Modern management science seeks to streamline and rationalise the business process; to base decision-making on proven facts and to eliminate risk and uncertainty. Unfortunately, businesses are run by human beings and depend on other human beings for their custom. Human beings, it seems safe to say, are irredeemably selfish, greedy, short-sighted and prone to mass delusion. Time and again throughout history, business and society have been blindsided by people’s irrational and unpredictable behaviour. And it’s not just the consumers: well-respected business executives and their advisors get swept up with euphoria and panic along with the rest of us; they succumb to greed; they fail to plan for likely crises (and sometimes even for inevitable ones). Blindsided looks at the history of such outbreaks of irrational behaviour, at the occurrence of unpredictable but likely events, such as global pandemics and collapses of law and order, and at changes that have caught forecasters by surprise, such as the ageing and declining population of some affluent modern societies. This fascinating book reminds the world of business that it needs to plan for the unexpected, and to realise that neither its consumers nor even its own executives must be expected to act with cool rationality at all times.
This textbook adopts a multi-perspective approach designed specifically to allow access to the topic from a wide range of educational and professional backgrounds and to develop understanding of a diversity of approaches and traditions at different levels.
Are humans too good at adapting to the earth’s natural environment? Every day, there is a net gain of more than 200,000 people on the planet—that’s 146 a minute. Has our explosive population growth led to the mass extinction of countless species in the earth’s plant and animal communities? Jeffrey K. McKee contends yes. The more people there are, the more we push aside wild plants and animals. In Sparing Nature, he explores the cause-and-effect relationship between these two trends, demonstrating that nature is too sparing to accommodate both a richly diverse living world and a rapidly expanding number of people. The author probes the past to find that humans and their ancestors have had negative impacts on species biodiversity for nearly two million years, and that extinction rates have accelerated since the origins of agriculture. Today entire ecosystems are in peril due to the relentless growth of the human population. McKee gives a guided tour of the interconnections within the living world to reveal the meaning and value of biodiversity, making the maze of technical research and scientific debates accessible to the general reader. Because it is clear that conservation cannot be left to the whims of changing human priorities, McKee takes the unabashedly neo-Malthusian position that the most effective measure to save earth’s biodiversity is to slow the growth of human populations. By conscientiously becoming more responsible about our reproductive habits and our impact on other living beings, we can ensure that nature’s services will make our lives not only supportable, but also sustainable for this century and beyond.
An argument that the commons is neither tragedy nor paradise but can be a way to understand environmental sustainability.
We see children squealing with delight in new-fallen snow. We see shocked survivors of the tsunami hugging broken bodies. We are not first objective, detached, or neutral. Instantly we are joyful or horrified. A singular force fuels our joy and our horror: agape. Agape is as palpable as gravity. As weight is to gravity, so good is to agape (or, in violation, so evil is to agape). Predominant Western rationalities preclude theorizing of agape. So secular intellectuals, awakened to agape but conceptually hobbled, lament a “crisis of foundations” in ethics and a “legitimization crisis” in political theory. In the light of agape, however, there is no question about any sovereign’s basic ethical responsibilities nor about myriad ethical issues (the evils of pedophilia, rape, slavery, racism, exploiting illness for profit). Thus, agape can ground ethics globally. Moreover, insofar as “faithful” signifies not propositional assent but living fidelity to agape, agape can ground interfaith spiritual consensus. Engaging intellectuals from Augustine and Dostoevsky to Emmanuel Levinas and Peter Singer, tackling issues from animal rights and the essence of spirituality to the passion of Torah and interfaith relations, Greenway demonstrates the spiritual fecundity and real-world ethical potentials that flow from philosophical exploration of agape.
Managing increasing global interdependence
Edited in collaboration with FoLLI, the Association of Logic, Language and Information, this book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Logic, Rationality, and Interaction, LORI 2009, held in Chongqing, China, in October 2009. The 24 revised full papers presented together with 8 posters were carefully reviewed and selected from a flood of submissions. The workshops topics include but are not limited to semantic models for knowledge, for belief, and for uncertainty, dynamic logics of knowledge, information flow, and action, logical analysis of the structure of games, belief revision, belief merging, logics for preferences and utilities, logics of intentions, plans, and goals, logics of probability and uncertainty, argument systems and their role in interaction, as well as norms, normative interaction, and normative multiagent systems.
The Environmental Responsibility Reader is a definitive collection of classic and contemporary environmental works that offers a comprehensive overview of the issues involved in environmental responsibility, steering the reader through each development in thought with a unifying and expert editorial voice. This essential text expertly explores seemingly intractable modern-day environmental dilemmas - including climate change, fossil fuel consumption, fresh water quality, industrial pollution, habitat destruction, and biodiversity loss. Starting with 'Silent Spring' and moving through to more recent works the book draws on contemporary ideas of environmental ethics, corporate social responsibility, ecological justice, fair trade, global citizenship, and the connections between environmental and social justice; configuring these ideas into practical notions for responsible action with a unique global and integral focus on responsibility.
Plant ecology is the scientific study of the factors influencing the distribution and abundance of plants. This benchmark text, extremely well received in its first edition, shows how pattern and structure at different levels of plant organization--from ecophysiology through population dynamics to community structure and ecosystem function--are influenced by abiotic factors (eg, climate and soils) and by biotic factors (eg, competition and herbivory). Adopting a dynamic approach, this book combines descriptive text with theoretical models and experimental data. It will be invaluable reading for both student and practising ecologist alike. In this second edition, the structure of the book has been completely revised, moving from the small scale to the large scale, in keeping with contemporary teaching methods. This fresh approach allows consideration of several new and important topics such as plant secondary chemistry, herbivory, sex, and breeding systems. Additional chapters address topical applied issues in plant ecology including global warming, pollution and biodiversity. The latest edition of a very widely adopted textbook Written by a team of leading experts and edited by an international authority in the field