James G. Carrier isAdjunct Professor of Anthropology, Indiana University and Honorary Research Associate, Department of Anthropology, Oxford Brookes University. His recent books include Occidentalism: Images of the West and Meanings of the Market: The Free Market in Western Culture.

• Chapter 1 Preface Chapter 2 Introduction Chapter 3 1: Selling Space: Power and Resource Allocation in a Caribbean Coastal Community Chapter 4 2: "Working in Nature", "Caring for Nature": Diverse Views of the Environment in the Context of an Environmental Dispute Chapter 5 3: Developing "Nature": Global Ecology and the Politics of Conservation in Northern Pakistan Chapter 6 4: Getting Engaged: Pollution, Toxic Illness, and Discursive Shift in a Tokyo Community Chapter 7 5: Environmental Conservation and Institutional Environments in Jamaica Chapter 8 6: A Situated Global Imperative: Debating (the Nation's) Forests in Finland Chapter 9 7: A Changing Sense of Place: Direct Action and Environmental Protest in the U.K. Chapter 10 Conclusion: Understandings Matter

Attentive to both thick description and general processes, exploring and critically engaging with the concepts of the local and the global, Confronting Environments represents an important moment in the revival and rethinking of environmental anthropology. Situating themselves at different ethnographic sites, the authors disentangle the 'environment' as well as the politics and abstractions frequently used to represent it. This book is to be recommended for environmentalists and students of human-environmental relations. It is a timely project, given the urgency of environmental problems and our failures to adequately act and to understand.