Oldal 11 [11]
OCR
PREFACE 9 a position on them. The chapters Environmental Philosophy and Religion and Ecology (Judit Farkas) review the worldview that led to the duality of man and nature, and to the environmental problems rooted in it, on the one hand.On the other, they survey the religious efforts and philosophical trends that have appeared in reaction to it. In a similar vein, Tamas Kocsis outlines the pertinent economic question and possible economic answers in the article Economic Answers to the Challenges of Environmental Sustainability. Possible links to different fields of the humanities and the respective questions are discussed in the papers The Environment and Anthropology (ecological anthropology, Judit Farkas), Green History? What is the Role of Historians Works on Problems of the Environment in the Past and What Could It Become? (history, Rébert Balogh), Eco-social Work. New Challenges on the Horizon of Social Work (social work, Szilvia Nyers), Environmental conflicts, social answers (political science, Viktor Glied), Basic Problems of Regulation in Environmental Protection (jurisprudence, Attila Panovics), The Conservation of Nature and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (ecology, Anna Varga) and The Tragedy and Comedy of the Commons (human ecology, Andras Takacs-Santa). With a background in social geography and regional research, Gabor Maté and Gabor Pirisi place two issues under the microscope: global overpopulation (Gabor Pirisi) and the notion and significance of regions (Gabor Maté). Environmental problems also affect such vital human needs as food, an issue addressed by Dorottya Mendly and Melinda Mihaly in their paper Food Supply as a Global Challenge. In his study Environmental Justice, Gyula Nagy discusses some more latent consequences of environmental problems which, however, gravely affect certain social groups. EH is of the position that the arts are important means of both communicating and solving these problems. The first large block ends with the chapter Nature, Art, Activism (Judit Farkas), which introduces several endeavors, trends and artists. Although the first section also contains Hungarian examples, the second block titled Communal Answers focuses explicitly on communal examples. The authors discuss case studies, representing both cities and the countryside, which try to provide answers not only to ecological but also to social problems. The Old Cottage project in Késpallag reveals the possibilities of an ecological local development project for a community center controlled by young people (Pal Géza Balogh — Luca Kaszds — Rebeka Kiss), the paper on the ecovillages discusses the international movement with a past of several decades and its adoption in Hungary (Judit Farkas). Two examples of urban communal responses are examined more closely: the Transition Towns movement and the communal gardens, both illustrated by Hungarian examples: the Green Spot Communal Garden in Pécs and the Transforming Wekerle in Budapest. Andras Takacs-Santa presents the communal initiatives he launched: the Small Community Program and the Uj Koma Halé. The book touches on many relevant areas, yet there are several other themes that should be included but remain absent. Such are psychology, urbanism, literature, and, among the arts, theater and film . The basic aim of this book is to acquaint the reader with EH as a framework of several interrelated themes, some of which it presents in more detail here. A future volume will continue its work of acquainting readers with more aspects of EH. Today EH integrates a great many branches of scholarship, but some disciplines can be pinpointed in which its roots extend deeper. These include literary studies, cultural geography, history and cultural anthropology. It was no accident that I
