A foreword commenting on the anthropology of tax as a field of study and important topics for research. These include examining tax as the materialisation of value regimes and relations of power, as well as interrogating the work that goes into producing the fiscal subject.

One of the primary ways we encounter animals is as a food source. The dominant system of animal agriculture is “factory farming,” which is designed to produce the greatest amount of meat at the lowest possible cost. Factory farming is grossly inefficient from an ecological point of view, imposes enormous suffering on animals, and damages both humans and the environment. “Conscientious omnivores” reject factory farming but defend painlessly killing animals for food. Some defend hunting because they think it promotes other important values as well. These arguments are rejected by vegetarians and vegans, but they remind us that concerns about animals exist against the background of other values, including those that relate to the broader value of nature.

The words ‘nature’ and ‘environment’ have different senses and referents. The idea of the environment is keyed to what surrounds us, and we can speak of natural and built environments as well as others. This book is concerned with ethical questions about the environment. Many of these concern problems that occur at different scales and cause harms of various types. Environmental problems can be viewed from technological, economic, religious, and aesthetic perspectives, among others. No single perspective provides the sole correct or exhaustive way of viewing environmental problems. There is an ethical dimension to most environmental problems and that is the focus of this book.

Today, bitch is one of the handiest words in the English language. It’s used to express a multitude of emotions – anger, horror, fear, frustration, despair, envy, resentment, shock, surprise, pain, and pity. But on the other hand, it can also express happiness, excitement, and endearment. Bitch is invoked to offend people, but also to compliment them, to complain, or to show camaraderie. Bitch is complicated. It can mean so many things at once, and yet, it has still retained its original humble meaning. It’s been quite a journey for “bitch.” But one thing’s for sure – bitch is still on its journey.

This chapter revisits the Expert Transition Cycle presented in Chapter 3 from the perspective of how identity changes. Five stages of the Expert Transition Cycle operate during transition. Intention orients and clarifies choices and provides drive. Inquiry holds open the transition process with criteria for choice and discrimination based upon intention. Exploration actively investigates the familiar and the new elements of identity, roles, social situations, work opportunities, beliefs, and performance. Commitment narrows and targets the choices made regarding those elements. Integration modifies and adapts the identity to include new elements, knowledge, experience, and beliefs. Each stage of the Expert Transition Cycle is reviewed in light of the operation of the transition experiences, such as cognitive flexibility and purpose. This is discussed in light of the retrospective interviews with twenty-four elite performers in three domains (business, sports, and music) who successfully and repeatedly transitioned to higher positions within their field.

This chapter reports on a study that examines the cultivation of values in teaching ancient history in an Australian junior secondary school classroom. We focus on how the values of ‘democracy’ are discussed in learning about ‘city-states and governments in Ancient Greece’. Our analysis makes visible the language resources used to establish ‘democratic’ values and how these values are transmitted in the discourse of teaching and learning. We first identify three sources of evaluation – including the school’s history perspective, the teacher’s perspective, and the perspective of Australian citizens. We show that as the source of evaluation changes, different types of ‘democratic’ value are enacted. Democracy is formulated as a set of values enacted by clusters of evaluations, in opposition to what is evaluated as ‘non-democracy’. We also consider how the teacher confirms or rejects instances of evaluation as they work to form ‘bonds’, aligning students into a community of shared values. The chapter makes explicit the fact that in building knowledge of history, ‘what you know’ and ‘how you feel’ construct ‘who you are’.

The contributors to this book represent a wide breadth of scholarly approaches, including law, social and environmental science, and engineering, as well as from the arts and humanities. The chapters explore what environmental violence is and does, and the variety of ways in which it affects different communities. The authors draw on empirical data from countries and regions around the globe, including Ukraine, French Polynesia, Latin America, and the Arctic. The variety of responses to environmental violence by different communities, whether through active resistance or the creative arts, is also discussed, providing the foundation on which to build alternatives to the potentially damaging trajectory on which humans currently find themselves. This book is indispensable for researchers and policymakers in environmental policy and peacebuilding. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Community organizing within local faith-based institutions (churches, synagogues, mosques, etc.) is now widespread in the US and has seen adoption in several other countries. As congregation-based organizing has grown and matured as a field over four decades, leaders have drawn strong connections between the social and political goals of community organizing and the religious traditions and values of the participating congregations. This blending of organizing practices and religious traditions has been crucial to the success of this approach. This chapter describes some of the practices that congregation-based community organizing initiatives employ to build power among residents who are actively participating in defining and deciding how to alter the systems that affect their lives. A statewide organizing federation (PICO California) and the reflections of influential organizer Jose Carrasco serve as a case example of the intertwining of interfaith values with a power-based organizing approach.

Malala Yousafzai won the Nobel Peace Prize when she was seventeen. In part, the world knows about her because when the Taliban prohibited girls from attending school in Afghanistan, she spoke up about it, writing articles and giving talks. As is clear by her writing, Malala has strong values that include justice and equality for women as well as a love of learning and education. She also values safety. In making her choice to speak up and criticize her government’s decision, Malala was aware that she was increasing risks to herself and her family. In response, the Taliban shot (then fifteen-year-old) Malala in the head while she was on a school bus. Thankfully, she survived and continues to advocate for a future where girls are free to learn and lead.

Malala made decisions based on trade-offs among her values, even when the priority she placed on equality and justice made her vulnerable to Taliban hostility and increased her own risk of death.

After earning a commerce degree, Will got a corporate job and wore a suit to work every day, then came home to a rental condo in the city he shared with his girlfriend. After about a year he started to wonder why he wasn’t happy. Maybe if he took more time off or got a dog? But after another year of his job, a bit of travelling with his girlfriend, and a year of going on jogs and throwing sticks for their puppy, he still felt miserable. Will realized he had been doing all the things that mattered to others without knowing what truly mattered to himself. In a flurry of decisions, Will quit his job, broke up with his girlfriend, and moved back in with his parents. That’s when he ran into an old family friend, Leah, and, in a rush of details, told her about his life since graduation.

Exploring Consequences, the fourth Decision-Maker Move, is about understanding what will happen as the result of selecting any of the various options. Or rather, what is most likely to happen. Keep in mind, both uncertainty (about what occurs) and luck (either good or bad) often play a part in how things actually turn out. Study and do well on the exam, knowing that spending the evening studying won’t be much fun. Don’t study and probably do poorly on the exam but have a good time for a few hours the night before. It’s all about the consequences. Eat the fruit salad or soup special for lunch, feel great in the afternoon and get a lot done. Choose the huge burger and a double order of fries, feel sleepy and get less done the rest of the day. Consequences follow from the choices we make.

Decisions are doors that provide people of all ages with opportunities to express who they are and to learn about who they want to become. Sometimes the young people in your life may choose the wrong door and, while that can make for a good learning experience, you probably want to help them make good decisions and avoid the bad ones. You did, after all, decide to open up this book. While we cannot program kids with the answers they need to live healthy and fulfilling lives, we can support kids in learning and using a common-sense approach to understanding and organizing their feelings and thoughts as they make their own decisions.

Creating options is an exciting and fun part of making decisions. It’s what changes “I have to do this” (reluctantly solving a problem) to “I get to do this” (enthusiastically creating an opportunity). People often excuse their decisions by saying, “I didn’t have a choice – it’s just something I had to do.” But that’s rarely true. Decision options are almost always available.

If one young person is about to make a decision, helping them construct options is relatively straightforward. Once they are clear about which values might be affected, they can generate different options likely to satisfy these qualities.