This collection of essays and commentaries explores analytical dimensions related to large-scale transformative thresholds and "tipping points" related to global human and environmental futures. The essays were based on a British global environmental change and sustainability conference. The contributors focus on the various notions of tipping points and possible responses to them.
Type of Material:
Open access ebook
Recommended Uses:
This book would work well as the primary reading for a course on social change, climate change, or other subjects concerned with adjusting to rapidly changing circumstances. It may also be used for self-paced individual reading.
Technical Requirements:
Downloads as PDF
Identify Major Learning Goals:
By completing this, readers will be able:
To describe the possible global environmental, economic, and political futures faced by humans in 2050 as predicted by experts.
To highlight likely scenarios in responding to possible global tipping points in the economy, politics, and enivonment.
Target Student Population:
College Upper Division, Graduate School. This ebook is directed at policymakers, policy analysts, researchers, and the general public. This may be used for units on environmental sustainability, food security, international business, and global communications in upper-division undergraduate and graduate courses in geography, earth science, and global studies.
Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills:
Solid background on contending perspectives on geography, earth science (climate change), global studies, international politics would be useful for readers.
Content Quality
Rating:
Strengths:
The collection provides an introductory overview on the analytical concept of the global "tipping point" and offers case studies related to climate and biodiversity issues, food security, business markets, spirituality, and media coverage. In general, the content provides current and appropriate information and is supported by research. Chapters and commentaries integrate core concepts well.
The chapters in the book are wide-ranging, detailed, and thorough. There is suffficient material in the book for an entire course.
Concerns:
The collection lacks examination of lessons from social movements and people's struggles to make corporations and governments accountable and responsive to adopt policies, laws, and agreements towards greater environmental sustainability and economic equality and justice. In addition, large-scale historical information and interpretation (particularly, related to earlier examples of human interventions in preventing tipping-points changes) are missing to highlight how people within nations have been able to change governments and state policies to advance better policies.
Potential Effectiveness as a Teaching Tool
Rating:
Strengths:
As a collection of academic essays and policy commentaries, it provides opportunities for students to think deeply about global tipping points. It offers learners a solid overview of one way to analyze global problems and transformation and several case studies on global tipping points across chapters and related commentaries. The book can be an engaging framework for discourse and a springboard for further research.
Concerns:
The collection would be more practical for many non-academics if it offered more explicit lessons from grassroots social movements responding to various global problems.
Specifically, it would benefit students and non-academics in having a learning supplement that would provide concrete cases to reducing large-scale negative human impacts on the environment and global economy and provide appropriate learning activities (such as case study simulations) for each section of the book.
Ease of Use for Both Students and Faculty
Rating:
Strengths:
The PDF-formatted ebook is designed using a consistent and visually appealing style (by Oxford University Press for the British Academy). The text is lucid and engaging.
Concerns:
As a PDF file, the layout of the ebook (in terms of fonts, font sizes, and so on) remains fixed, similar to the original paperbound version of the book.
It would be more digitally accessible and interactive if the ebook was available as web pages or as an ePUB-formatted document, which would allow greater layout flexibility for students and readers.
Creative Commons:
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