Sustainability in the Twenty-first Century

2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (7) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gian Carlo Delgado Ramos ◽  
Mireya Imaz Gispert ◽  
Ana Beristain Aguirre

<p class="p1"><span class="s1">I</span><span class="s2">t is we</span><span class="s3">ll </span><span class="s2">estab</span><span class="s3">l</span><span class="s2">ished </span>that there is a differentiated historic responsibility in the progressive erosion of the bio-geo-chemical systems that support life on the planet due, principally, to the action of human beings<span class="s4">. </span>The damage has reached such a degree and global spread that many are beginning to talk about a new geological era: the Anthropocene (Crutzen 2002).</p>

Author(s):  
Philip James

The two main themes contained within the title The Biology of Urban Environments are explored. The initial focus is on urban environments. A discussion of the origins of cities and the global spread of urbanization leads on to a consideration of urban environments in the twenty-first century. In the second section, the focus switches to biology. The scope of the discipline is set out in terms of both the range of sub-disciplines and of biological scales. It is established from this discussion that in this book the topics considered span from genes to ecosystems and will be illustrated by examples of the biology of micro-organisms, plants, and animals. Importantly humans will be included within this consideration: our biology is affected by urban environments. The final part presents the structure of the book.


2019 ◽  
Vol 139 (2-4) ◽  
pp. 271-284
Author(s):  
Amichai Magen

Adherents of economic and political liberty are again compelled to ask fundamental questions about the nature and prospects of good order (or Eunomia). This article: (1) offers a quaternary definition of the concept of “order;” (2) contends that Eunomia is essentially about the creation, adaptation, and protection of the conditions necessary for human beings to live lives that are free from fear so as to maximize each individual’s unique potential for human flourishing; and (3) outlines an evolutionary understanding of Eunomia, whereby contemporary liberal orders represent the cumulative outcome of three sets of elite-selected “wins” over illiberal ones. To survive and thrive in the twenty-first century liberalism must once again contest and defeat rival orders.


2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-24
Author(s):  
Alexander Kluge

Abstract The roots of theory lie in the spirit of resistance and “essential powers” that Karl Marx and Immanuel Kant ascribed to human beings. The poetic power of social life seeks and finds counter-algorithmic expression through narrative capacities of differentiation, and the poetic power of theory operates as a political alliance out of which emancipation of any kind becomes subjectively possible, without being subjectively controlled. What twenty-first-century forms of theoretical practice, sensory intelligence, and storytelling allow for the courage of cognition in a world dominated by Silicon Valley? If one dissolves the word power into the labor contained in it, petrified concepts are secretly changed, and heterogeneous “second-order” experience is made.


2021 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Townsend Middleton

This article explores the aftermath of quinine in India. Derived from cinchona, the fever tree, quinine was once malaria’s only remedy—and, as such, vital to colonial power. But it has left grave uncertainty in its wake. Today, little market exists for Indian quinine, but government cinchona plantations established by the British remain in Darjeeling. What will become of these dilapidated plantations and their 50,000 inhabitants is unclear. Crumbling quinine factories and overgrown cinchona may evoke ruination, but these remains are not dead. They have instead become the site of urgent efforts—and a periodically charged politics—to redefine land and life for the twenty-first century. This essay develops an analytics of becoming-after to ask not only, how do empires and human beings become-with world-historical substances like quinine but also, what do we make of life after they run their course?


2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-130
Author(s):  
David VanDrunen

This paper outlines a constructive account of natural law for the twenty-first century, rooted in the Reformed theological and confession heritage. It suggests how natural law can provide us with a deep theological way of affirming the existence of an objectively meaningful natural order, discusses the importance of natural law for maintaining the accountability of all human beings before the divine judgment, and reflects on how natural law serves as crucial foundation for the church’s ministry of the gospel to a hurting and needy world.


Author(s):  
David Cunning

Margaret Cavendish, a seventeenth-century philosopher, scientist, poet, playwright, and novelist, went to battle with the great thinkers of her time, and in many cases arguably got the better of them, but she did not have the platform that she would have had in the twenty-first century. She took a creative and systematic stand on the major questions of philosophy of mind, epistemology, metaphysics, and political philosophy. She defends a number of theses across her corpus: for example, that human beings and all other members of the created universe are wholly material; that matter is eternal; that the universe is a plenum of contiguous bodies; that matter is generally speaking knowledgeable and perceptive and that non-human creatures like spiders, plants, and cells exhibit wisdom and skill; that motion is never transferred from one body to another, but bodies always move by motions that are internal to them; that sensory perception is not via impressions or stamping; that we can have no ideas of immaterials; and that creatures depend for their properties and features on the behavior of the beings that surround them. Cavendish uses her fictional work to further illustrate these views, and in particular to illustrate the view that creatures depend on their surroundings for their social and political properties. For example, she crafts alternative worlds in which women are not seen as unfit for roles such as philosopher, scientist, and military general, and in which they flourish. This volume of Cavendish’s writings provides a cross-section of her interconnected writings, views, and arguments.


2013 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-27
Author(s):  
Stephen McClatchie

The recent theoretical turn in musicology has made the discipline more relevant, both within the university itself, and in the larger society within which it is situated. I consider what this development may mean for younger scholars, both as graduate students and as new faculty members, and explore the paradox that critical theory is often attacked for its impenetrability, yet has allowed us to communicate more easily with our colleagues in other disciplines. Finally, I argue that the primary aim for music study in the twenty-first century should be an ethical one: the creation of whole, musical human beings, literate in, and accustomed to thinking about, musics, plural, rather than Music.


Author(s):  
Shikha Vats ◽  

W. E. B. Du Bois (1903) had famously said that the problem of the twentieth century “is the problem of the color-line” (p. 13). Dipesh Chakrabarty declares, in this new volume, that the question of the twenty-first century will be that of climate crisis. The major events of the twentieth century, including the processes of imperialism, colonization, and globalization led to widespread migration of people all across the globe framing new intersubjective equations such as oppressor-oppressed, privileged-marginalized, mostly along what Du Bois called ‘the color-line’. The major fallout of this colonial and capitalist project in the last century has been global warming which is set to affect the entire planet and hence needs to be at the forefront of all policy decisions in the twenty-first century. In order to grapple with this new age of the Anthropocene, whereby human beings have become a geophysical force capable of altering the course of the planet, Chakrabarty urges a rethinking and reformulation of the discipline of history


Author(s):  
Erik Jon Byker ◽  
Tingting Xu ◽  
Juan Chen

In the twenty-first century, teachers and those who are preparing to become teachers are situated in a global and technological context. Such context necessitates that high quality teachers help to equip their learners to navigate an interconnected and interdependent world. Society's interconnectedness and interdependence means that the decisions made by an individual and a community affect the lives of other human beings around the world (Herrera, 2012). Being globally competent means understanding how the world is interrelated and the ways people can make a difference each other's lives. The purpose of this chapter is to describe and report on ways to develop globally competent teachers. The chapter also reports on the authors' empirical studies related to international perspectives on teacher preparation and the development of global competencies. The chapter concludes with empirical and practitioner-oriented recommendations for preparing high quality teachers to also be global competent.


2007 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 239-265
Author(s):  
ARNOLD N. PRONTO

At the turn of the twenty-first century rapid advances in the life sciences had culminated in the successful cloning of mammals, with the potential for the development of cures to major diseases. It also raised the spectre of the cloning of human beings – a possibility declared repugnant to human dignity by UNESCO in 1997. In 2001, France and Germany initiated a process in the UN General Assembly to negotiate an international treaty banning the reproductive cloning of human beings. What started as a seemingly straightforward proposal soon ran into the cross-winds of the broader debate on the ethical and legal appropriateness of human embryonic stem-cell research. A major confrontation ensued at the United Nations between those states favouring a narrow ban limited to cloning for reproductive purposes, and those insisting on prohibiting all forms of human cloning, including for ‘therapeutic’ purposes. At play was not only a difference in worldview as to the meaning of human dignity in the twenty-first century (and the boundaries on scientific research), but also considerations relating to respect for cultural diversity, the economic consequences of finding cures to major diseases, and the ability of the technological ‘have-nots’ to limit the activities of the technological ‘haves’.


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