Science and Sensibility: Negotiating an Ecology of Place / Edition 1

by Michael Vincent McGinnis

Overview

If humans are to understand and discover ways of addressing complex social and ecological problems, we first need to find intimacy with our particular places and communities. Cultivating a relationship to place often includes a negotiating process that involves both science and sensibility. While science is one key part of an adaptive and resilient society, the cultivation of a renewed sense of place and community is essential as well.

Science and Sensibility argues for the need for ecology to engage with philosophical values and economic motivations in a political process of negotiation, with the goal of shaping humans' treatment of the natural world. Michael Vincent McGinnis aims to reframe ecology so it might have greater “trans-scientific” awareness of the roles and interactions among multiple stakeholders in socioecological systems, and he also maintains that deep ecological knowledge of specific places will be crucial to supporting a sustainable society. He uses numerous specific case studies from watershed, coastal, and marine habitats to illustrate how place-based ecological negotiation can occur, and how reframing our negotiation process can influence conservation, restoration, and environmental policy in effective ways.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520285200
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	03/22/2016
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	734,207
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Michael Vincent McGinnis is Associate Professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California. He is the editor of Bioregionalism and is the author of Marine Governance: The New Zealand Experience.

Table of Contents

Preface: Conversations with Sea and Stone ix

1 Negotiating Ecology in an Age of Climate Change 1

2 Household Words: Cultivating an Ecological Sensibility 31

3 Re-inhabitation: Watershed-Based Activism in Alta California 46

4 A River between Two Worlds: Watersheds and Wastesheds in Aotearoa (New Zealand) 63

5 Organic Machines and the End of Offshore Oil 83

6 The Politics of Civic Science: Marine Life Protection in California 109

7 The Challenge of Place-Based Ocean Governance in New Zealand 131

8 Toward a Blue Economy: Songs of Migration and the Leviathan of Global Trade by Sea 151

9 Islands in a Turbulent Sea 174

10 Restoring Place in the Theater of the Anthropocene 187

Bibliography 211

Index 229

Editorial Reviews

"Science and Sensibility presents a compelling and motivating argument that can inform academic, individual, organizational, and political conversations around the tangible next steps that are needed to recover the commons, foster bioregional adaptation, and cultivate ecological identity."

Society & Natural Resources