Reclaiming Nature

InReclaiming Nature, leading environmental thinkers from across the globe explore the relationship between human activities and the natural world. The authors draw inspiration and lessons from diverse experiences ranging from community-based fishery and forestry management to innovative strategies for combating global warming. They advance a compelling new vision of environmentalism, founded on the link between the struggle to reclaim nature and the struggle for social justice. This book advances three core propositions: first, humans can and do have positive as well as negative effects on the natural environment. By restoring degraded ecosystems and engaging in co-evolutionary processes, people can add value to nature's wealth. Second, every person has an inalienable right to clean air, clean water, and a healthy environment. These are not privileges to be awarded on the basis of political power, nor commodities to be allocated on the basis of purchasing power -- they are fundamental human rights. Third, low-income communities are not the root of the problem. Rather they are the heart of the solution. In cities and the countryside across the world, ordinary people are forging a vibrant new environmentalism that is rooted in the defense of their lives and livelihoods.

James K. Boyce teaches in the fields of development economics and environmental economics, and directs the Political Economy Research Institute's Program on Development, Peacebuilding and the Environment at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.  He is co-editor of Natural Assets: Democratizing Environmental Ownership (Island Press, 2003), and editor of Economic Policy for Building Peace: Lessons of El Salvador (Lynne Rienner, 1996), an outcome of the Adjustment Toward Peace project, which he coordinated on behalf of the United Nations Development Programme. Sunita Narain is director of the Centre for Science and the Environment in New Delhi. Elizabeth A. Stanton is a researcher at the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University.