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Some of the most influential ideas about national and even global security reflect untenable, anachronistic strategic views that are simply no longer appropriate for contemporary international circumstances. At a time when climate change poses an existential threat to the continuation of life itself, there is an urgent need to rethink security priorities while we still can. This book provides an explanation of the failures and dangers of the conventional strategic wisdom, by examining the theoretical and practical basis of current security policies, especially in the United States and China. The book considers the possible importance of economic and psychological factors that are generally ignored in the ‘grand strategies’ of the most powerful states. The case for a new approach that takes issues like environmental and human security much more seriously is developed, although the author is not confident such measures will be adopted, especially in the limited time available to make a real difference.

This book introduces and explores the concept of ‘secondary cities’—cities that fuel, compete with, and are otherwise relationally connected to larger and dynamic neighbouring cities. Emphasizing the significance of intra-regional relationality to contemporary urban conditions and challenging common representations of urban development ‘success’ and ‘failure’, this book advances a research agenda that centres uneven urban development concerns and opens space for reimaging urban and regional development. While most scholarly engagements with ‘regions’ and ‘city-regions’ and processes of ‘metropolisation’ proceed from the perspective of the regional core-city, this book takes as the starting point the secondary city perspective. Doing so emphasizes the subordinate status of secondary cities relative to their dominant neighbours and considers how the regional distribution of power and resources shape urban conditions. Gathering leading international scholars, and drawing from case studies in Europe, Australia, and North America, the book illustrates the secondary city experience and situates it within urban development theory and practice. In a moment when welcome attention is being brought to ‘ordinary’ cities, small cities, shrinking cities, legacy cities, and cities otherwise understood to fall outside the usual emphasis on global winners, the secondary city concept highlights the importance of scale and relationality to understanding contemporary urban conditions. The book seeks to understand the complex political and economic dynamics that characterize the relationships between secondary cities and regional core-cities, raising new questions about urban and regional development in the Global North and reimagining the subordinate status of secondary cities to showcase their full potential.

How we can enjoy our lives in a way that does not cost the Earth? Paradoxically, while happiness is ultimately good, our search for it often fails. A clear sign of our collective failure is that no single country on earth has achieved a social minimum while also remaining below the ecological ceiling. The problem lies in our unexamined assumptions, habits and beliefs about success. The mainstream world-view, that largely stems from economics, identifies happiness with pleasure and sees pleasure-seeking as a lonely and selfish exercise.This book aims to inspire us to an alternative world-view by inviting us (1) to refine our understanding of a thriving life, (2) to consider how we want to attain it, and (3) to explore our inner contradictions, saboteur and progressive forces. Ancient Greek hedonists can inspire us to live a life of ‘sustainable hedonism‘. Aristotle’s approach to happiness as ‘flourishing’ can support our ability for conscious action based on virtues and in community. Recent scientific knowledge also highlights the potential pitfalls of searching happiness, and offers pathways on how to live an ecologically-responsible life without a reduction in well-being.The book concludes by showing how the Theatre of the Soul can offer experiential learning in which we can outgrow our outdated strategies, which sabotage our flourishing life, so that ultimately we are able to experience ourselves as autonomous, creative beings living in loving and mutually strengthening relationships with others and with the Earth. Ultimately, we can become both more virtuous and better hedonists.

As the biodiversity crisis deepens, this book sets out radical environmental thinking and action to respond to the threat of mass species extinction. The book conceptualises large-scale injustice endangering non-humans, and signposts new approaches to the conservation of a shared planet. Developing principles of distributive ecological justice, the book builds towards a bold vision of just conservation that can inform the work of policy makers and activists. The book begins with an overview of ecological justice, sometimes referred to as ecojustice. It refers to interspecies justice, which describes the author's relational and global understanding of the justice relationship between humans and nonhumans. The book seeks to present an account of global non-ranking biocentric distributive ecological/interspecies justice to wild nonhuman beings. It concludes that the human takeover of the Earth's ecological space — its resources, ecosystem benefits, and actual spaces — that ultimately leads to species extinctions constitutes an injustice, which should be discussed and responded to as a matter of justice. The book is a timely investigation into ethics in the natural world during the Anthropocene, and a call for biocentric ecological justice before it is too late.

Current climate change policy is necessary but insufficient. This is because the basic modus operandi – presenting scientific evidence to states for them to take action - misrepresents the complex process of anthropogenic climate change. The ‘anthropo’ bit is neglected in a misconceived supply-side (carbon) interpretation. The key question is, why is there so much demand for this carbon in the first place? This book introduces a demand-side interpretation bringing cities to the fore as central players in both generating climate changes and for finding solutions. Jane Jacobs’ urban analysis is combined with William F. Ruddiman’s historical tracing of greenhouse gases to provide a new understanding and narrative of anthropogenic climate change. The conclusion is that we are locked into a path to terminal consumption, which is accelerating as a consequence of Chinese urban growth, historically unprecedented in its sheer scale. To counter this we need to harness the power of cities in new ways, to steer urban demand away from its current destructive path. This is nothing less than re-inventing the city: not mitigation (the resilient city, necessary but not sufficient), not adaptation (sustainable city, also necessary but not sufficient) but stewardship, a process of dynamic stability creating the posterity city in sync with nature.

The current era of globalization is characterized by a high degree of interconnectedness across borders and continents. This not only goes hand in hand with significant levels of international trade and foreign direct investments but also with migration, which is all too often driven by conflicts of various kinds. While various interdependencies between conflict and migration have been explored in the literature, a link that is not yet sufficiently understood relates to the interdependencies between environmental or resource-related conflicts and migration as well as the role of governance in this respect. This book strives to overcome some of these shortages in providing an interdisciplinary analysis of the interconnectedness between environmental and resource conflicts and migration. To this end, the contributions of this book address four core questions: (i) When do environmental and resource-related problems lead to conflicts and how does this create incentives for migration? How does the governance of natural resources either reduce or enhance the chances of conflicts and migration to emerge? (ii) Who leaves a country and where do migrants go? Which migration governance arrangements are at play in mediating conflicts and in directing migration flows? (iii) How do the trajectories of national, regional and international migration governance regimes look like? How effectively do they regulate environmental or resource-related migration? (iv) Which effects does migration have on possible conflict dynamics in destination countries and what is the role of governance arrangements in this respect? How do host countries participate in governance for the prevention of environmental or resource-related conflicts in countries of origin in order to reduce or prevent migration?

Academic texts on cycling research are expanding rapidly. A dominant theme among these is the use of infrastructure measures to assist promotion of cycling as part of a movement towards sustainable mobility. Physical infrastructure is currently posited as the primary key to unlock cycling’s potential as a primary mode of sustainable transport. Individual studies rarely stand together to be read back to back, in order to allow comparison between them. The privilege of academic conferences is that they allow the attendee to compare and contrast different academic agendas and concerns of researchers, and to engage in conversation between them. This volume provides a comparative assessment of existing and historic struggles over cycling infrastructure. The aim of this volume is to bring a selection of those parallel voices together and to initiate that dialogue for a wider audience. It is argued that planning is one element of the operation, but what results is often very different from even the most comprehensive strategic imagination. Underlying this chaos however, is a lurking sense that the broader lessons of infrastructure provision for cycling needs to be connected with the political analyses of infrastructuring that derive from wider studies. The book concludes that infrastructures are in constantly in flux, contentious and contended. Furthermore, it concludes that politics is also embodied; lived out in the spaces of mundane and everyday travel.

Governments around the world are seeing the locality as a key arena for effecting changes in governance, restructuring state/civil society relations and achieving sustainable growth. This book critically analyses this shift towards localism in planning through exploring neighbourhood planning; one of the fastest growing, most popular and most contentious contemporary planning initiatives. Bringing together original empirical research with critical perspectives on governance and planning, the book engages with broader debates on the purposes of planning, the construction of active citizenship, the uneven geographies of localism and the extent to which power is actually being devolved. Setting this within an international context with cases from the US, Australia and France, the book reflects on the possibilities for the emergence of a more progressive form of localism.