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Rivers have played a defining role in the global development of human societies and culture. This will undoubtedly continue in the twenty-first century with a growing demand for water, increasing pollution of river channel and floodplain environments, and anthropogenic global warming-related changes in the frequency of floods and droughts. These will have major environmental and societal impacts worldwide. We consider how rivers initially shaped societies, and then how urbanisation, industrialisation and intensified agriculture have more recently transformed river systems, so compromising planetary health and human ways of life. So where do we go from here? Humanity now faces an existential environmental catastrophe of its own making, and it will be on the world's most densely populated floodplains where this crisis will be played out. We highlight likely areas facing the greatest challenges. Ironically, many of these are where ancient civilisations began. Interdisciplinary catchment-based approaches, and new technologies such as those based on satellite imagery and unmanned aerial vehicles, are now beginning to address pressing societal and planetary problems in the unfolding climate crisis.

The virtuous character and the ethical agent represent mutually inclusive terms, neither of which independently, in the Aristotelian tradition, is considered an innate quality. Virtues, if not innate, are contingent; but what makes each instantiation recognisably general? Normative ethics in this sense is a dynamic process and similarly process philosophy is based on the principle that existence is dynamic and that it should be the primary focus of any philosophical account of reality. I argue that the transformative process is equally as important as the end result of realising the virtuous dispositional traits. An important criticism of virtue ethics is the focus on character and not rules such as industry practices and codes found in the professions. The criticism however is less worrisome than usually accepted. The reasoning herein developed to overcome this criticism rests on the presupposition that no one exists in isolation and virtues are developed in a social context and not simply given. Using process philosophy as a methodological approach to examine virtue ethical agency and the transformative process involved in its realisation elicits insights that allow the conceptual development of a more robust account of virtue ethics. I extend this nuanced rendition, in ways already commenced by others, into areas of organisational, environmental and intergenerational ethics.

Intergenerational confinement is an under-recognized, policy-driven issue which greatly impacts Indigenous and racialized peoples in countries with ongoing colonial legacies. Numerous policy solutions enacted over colonial history have exacerbated instead of mitigated this situation. This chapter advances an improved understanding of the impacts of carceral legacies, moving beyond the dominant focus of parental incarceration in the literature. Focusing on Indigenous peoples, multiple generations in families and communities have been subjected to changing methods of confinement and removal. Using critical policy analysis and interview research, this chapter interrogates these intergenerational impacts of carceral policy-making in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 124 people in the three case countries, this chapter centers perspectives of people who have been intergenerationally confined in carceral institutions. With a goal of transformation, it then explores an alternative orientation to policy-making that seeks to acknowledge, account for, and address the harmful direct and indirect ripple-effects of carceral strategies over generations.

This concluding chapter summarises the main themes and topics discussed in this book, synthesising the key issues facing contemporary anti-racism efforts. It reflects on a possible anti-racist future(s) in a context of greater sociocultural affiliations and more interconnected local and global environments. Ideas about race and ethnicity have adapted, and racial hierarchies, structures and processes continuously shape the way social groups engage, interact and live with difference. This raises questions regarding the enduring influence of race and racism. What will the state of multiracial societies be in the evolving digital economy that has transformed the structural and institutional environment affecting everyday life? What kind of an anti-racist future can be imagined that will contribute to ensuring greater social equity? This chapter ponders on a range of possibilities to chart directions towards an anti-racist future that fosters increased intercultural understanding for relational engagements across difference. It draws conclusions and lessons for an anti-racist future and lays out some directions for future research.

The central thesis developed during this study is the idea that human dignity must be understood as the right to be recognised as a participant in the institutional practice of human and fundamental rights. This form of association between human dignity and human rights is a response to the various barbarities of the twentieth century, whether by fascist, Nazi, and socialist regimes in Europe, either by South African apartheid or by military dictatorships in Latin America. Human dignity after Auschwitz is the foundation for the construction of a post-metaphysical institutional morality, independent of an idealised concept of rational subjective personality and closer to the historical and material conditions to guarantee the political personality of every human being. In order to defend this thesis, the study is conducted in two steps. First, two conceptions of dignity will be discussed, namely dignity of man and human dignity. Second, it is intended to discuss how the modern conception was incorporated into the practice of human rights after Auschwitz as a way of responding to a crisis in the modern model of the practice of rights.

This chapter discusses guidelines that specify the ethical standards for medical research in very poor countries in order to show how a sociological explanation of illness causation and health care access can offer some additional insight into the refinement of those guidelines. There has been considerable discussion on the proper ethical standards to apply given the context of extreme poverty and inadequate health care infrastructure that characterizes poor countries. Our analysis is intended to suggest that a sociological explanation for illness causation provides a clear justification for including the social context when specifying ethical guidelines and also clarifies the issues that must be addressed. This perspective is particularly sensitive to inequalities in health and access to health resources among medical research subjects, and therefore addresses core issues of justice and beneficence.

Acts of mass violence are not a new phenomenon in the United States. Law enforcement and homeland security officials prepare, prevent, respond, investigate, and assist in prosecuting offenders in these events. How then can the greater homeland security community effectively avert future acts of mass violence with its even broader mission set? Physical and technological security countermeasures are not enough to prevent these types of incidents from occurring. The purpose of this chapter is to briefly give an overview of some of the research into the indicators and traits exhibited by perpetrators of mass violence and the best practices that have evolved to intervene as a result. Recognizing the common traits and behaviors displayed by past attackers, their surrounding influences and the common traumas most of them have experienced, is an essential first step in developing effective strategies to prevent acts of mass violence.

A sample of 217 Saudi children was surveyed to determine the impact of television commercials on their purchase behaviour. Reports the results of this survey, broken down by gender and discusses their implications. Offers suggestions for future research.

Since 1980s, institutional child sexual abuse has been ‘discovered’ as an internationally recognisable social problem. Public inquiries have become the most dominant mode of response to this, having been enacted throughout much of the western world. Driven by demands from victims/survivors for collective recognition, these have drawn on features of transitional justice as an important means of truth telling. While the role of survivors in precipitating the enactment of public inquiries has been well documented, less well understood is how social activism has been influenced in the aftermath of such inquiries. In this chapter, the authors explore a local phenomenon known as Loud Fence that arose in the Australian town of Ballarat as a case study to consider the relationship between activism and social change that can occur in the wake of official truth telling.