The summer's wasting.

May 12th, 2009

And it’s barely even started yet.

I haven’t been writing here much (okay, at all) because – as noted in March – I’ve been concentrating on the writing that somebody else is expected to read and then assign me a letter to indicate the quality of my work. Writing, I believe, is one of those things that one gets out of practice in; so is reading books with a bit more meat to them than, say, Honor Harrington novels. Besides, I’d rather write the literature review for my thesis in the next three months, when I don’t have to do anything else. So, the summer project for Sammy’s Dot will be an ongoing series of reflection on a self-directed reading program.

I just finished Michael Mayerfield Bell’s An Invitation to Environmental Sociology, Andrew Dobson’s Green Political Thought, and Desfor and Keil’s Nature and the City. I’ve still got The Politics of the Environment: Ideas, Activism, Policy (Neil Carter) and Mario Diani’s Green Networks to go. Up next, there’s a number of topics I want to explore in more detail.

Environment and Philosophy

Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics (Paul Taylor)

Environmental Philosophy (R. Elliot and A. Gare)

Food and Food Politics

Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health (Marion Nestle)

Development and Economics

Development as Freedom (Amartya Sen)

Inequality Reexamined (Amartya Sen)

Managing Without Growth (Peter Victor)

Political Science/Political Philosophy

A Theory of Justice (John Rawls)

Political Liberalism (John Rawls)

Risk Society: Toward a New Modernity (Ulrich Beck)

Ecological Politics in an Age of Risk (Ulrich Beck)

The Reinvention of Politics: Rethinking Modernity in the Global Social Order (Ulrich Beck)

World Risk Society (Ulrich Beck)

Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (Bruno Latour)

Environmental Citizenship (Andrew Dobson and David Bell)

Environmentalism and Political Theory: Toward an Ecocentric Approach (Robyn Eckersley)

Political Theory and the Ecological Challenge (Andrew Dobson and Robyn Eckersley)

Environmental Justice

Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality (Robert Bullard)

Sustainable Communities and the Challenge of Environmental Justice (J. Agyeman)

The Environmentalism of the Poor: A study of ecological conflicts and valuation (J. Martinez-Alier)

Staying Alive (Vandana Shiva)

Social Movements

Challenging the Political Order: New Social and Political Movements in Western Democracies (R. Dalton and M. Kuechler)

Social Movements: A Cognitive Approach (R. Eyerman and A. Jamison)

Studying Collective Action (M. Diani and R. Eyerman)

Frontiers in Social Movement Theory (A. Morris and C. Muller)

Organizing Dissent: Contemporary Social Movements in Theory and Practice (William Carroll)

Geography and Urban Studies

Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (David Harvey)

Special Places: The Changing Ecosystems of the Toronto Region (B. Roots, D. Chant, C. Heidenreich)

I’m pretty sure that this list will be getting longer, and I think thatI’ll really have to make a separate page to keep track of everything, but the plan, obviously, is to do some serious educatin’ this summer.