Reviews for Poverty Dynamics: Interdisciplinary Perspectives

The average rating for Poverty Dynamics: Interdisciplinary Perspectives based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-06-13 00:00:00 Michele Braun This book could've been so much better. It promised a lot - analyzing the dominant subcultures and praxes within the American Green movement, how they relate to the four pillars/ten key values, how they might achieve loose Green unity and the Green potential to transform American politics - but ends up failing to demonstrate much of anything. I can't decide if the faults of Kassman's analysis are due mainly to sloppy scholarship (misspells names, confuses Charles Reich and Robert Reich in citations, conflates deep ecology with ecofeminism, etc), shallow thinking (truncated cultural history of roots of Green thought, arbitrary selection of these three subcultures to be the dominant currents within the Green movement, etc) or overt bias (I'm sympathetic to Social Ecology, but his representation of other currents aren't very flattering - I've never heard any deep ecologist refer to their philosophy as "Mystical Deep Ecology", so Kassman shouldn't brand it as such either). How can you discuss Green thought in America with scant mention of E.F. Schumacher, no mention of the environmental movement of the 70s (aside from the fact that it was a social movement among others), the consumer movement, Mother Earth News/back-to-the-land-ers, etc? I understand he is focused on ideologies rather than movements, but these currents don't fit well within the three ideologies represented; they also, along with agrarians, represent more Greens than Social Ecology or Deep Ecology. That's a major problem when trying to work a useful analysis into an organizing strategy. As if the narrow choice of ideologies wasn't bad enough, the representations of these ideologies are flawed. For those unfamiliar with deep ecology, it has nothing to do with goddesses or paganism, but with Spinoza, ecological monism, and the radical critique of anthropocentrism in science. The term was coined by Arne Naess, though his name appears only twice - once in the section on Neo-Primitivism and once quoted as criticizing the conflation of deep ecology with mysticism - ironically, the very conflation Kassman had spent the previous ninety-eight pages developing. So, was Kassman's criticism an elaborate straw man or a critique of a popular misconception of deep ecology (without giving us the real article to compare)? He explicitly refers to deep ecologists as advocating a suppression of reason and critical thinking (uncited, of course), favoring intuition instead. He "evaluates" deep ecology's political thought without mentioning Naess' 8-point platform, let alone the debate over what the points mean. He places the origins of deep ecology with the "religious-metaphysical worldview" itself (as ahistorical an origin as "human nature"), while Naess lists a pretty clear ideological genealogy. It's not like this stuff is hidden or marginal, but Kassman doesn't mention it at all. And let me mention again, I lean in the direction of Social Ecology myself, so I am a sympathetic reader, but such blatant misrepresentation of deep ecology has compelled me to dig it out and study it again. Far from being irrational, exclusive, private and faith based, deep ecology calls for a radical re-evaluation of all human knowledge. It seems likely that its critique will be absorbed by Social Ecologists, it will shape mainstream science and will lose its distinct identity. Lastly, it's possible that I don't understand the technique of "incasting", but it looks like a storytelling heuristic to develop directions to study the implications of positions. Kassman's use seem like superficial stereotyped stories in place of analysis. Yes, it paints a picture in the mind and in a useful shorthand, but unless you know what the hell you're talking about, the picture in mind is worse than useless. In short, the Kassman's premise and promise are the most valuable part of this book. Read it for questions rather than answers.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-10-30 00:00:00 Laura Kennemer For anyone with an interest in the intersection of politics and sustainable urbanism, I would recommend reading this book. Moore asserts how the cities of Austin, Curitiba, and Frankfurt (due to Norman Foster's Commerzbank Tower) all realized what many across the globe regard as leading sustainable cities, yet did so utilizng vastly opposing ideas and practices of environmental philosophy and democracy, what he calls "narratives". Utilizing a pragmatist framework, Moore emphasizes how there is no one true definition of what sustainability is, but many that are created from place to place, context to context. This suggests that universal checklists of best practices (like LEED) or abstract models of sustainable development are not always appropriate, and that our realm of influence should rather be in directly shaping the narrative of the route to the sustainable city. With that summary, I found the choice of Frankfurt was odd given that Freiburg would have served as a better German/European model, but given his architectural background, I think it is acceptable to incorporate a building in the analysis since it embraces an interdisciplinary approach.