Culture and Environment

 

Series editors: David Zandvliet, Simon Fraser University

 

The theme Culture and Environment for this book series focuses on the multi-disciplinary nature of environmental topics and a view that our conceptions of cultureand environmentare inseparable and perhaps arise from within each other. This thinking also emphasizes that a shift in contemporary (western) cultural practices may be a necessary condition/requirement to rebuild and reinvent our global relation with nature and live more sustainably.  

 

This series is also informed by the construct of Bio-Cultural diversity which is described as ‘the diversity of life in all its manifestations: biological, cultural, and linguistic— which are interrelated within a complex socio-ecologicaladaptive system.’ This diversity of life is made up not only of the diversity of plants and animal species, habitats and ecosystems, but also of the diversity of human cultures and languages. It is important to note that the concept of bio-cultural diversity is itself dynamic in nature and takes the local values and practices of different cultural groups as its’ starting point for sustainable living. 

 

This series publishes imaginative scholarship that connects the pedagogical and curricular with an international diversity of environmental, ecological and cultural disciplines.  For educators, the issue is not only to work to preserve / restore important practices and values, but also to modify, adapt and create diversity in ways that resonate with both rural and urban school populations. For book proposals to this series, issues of cultural and biological diversity are conceived as a reflexive and sensitizing concepts that can be used to assess the different values and knowledge of all people – as a reflection on how they live now and in the future.