Catherine Walker

Available Open Access under CC-BY licence. How do environmental policies link to dynamic and relational family practices for children and parents? This Policy Press Short presents innovative cross-national research into how ‘environment’ is understood and negotiated within families, and how this plays out in everyday lives. Based on an ESRC study that involved creative, qualitative work with families in India and the UK who live in different contexts, this book illuminates how environmental practices are negotiated within families, and how they relate to values, identities and society. In doing so, it contributes to understanding of the ways in which families and childhood are constructed as sites for intervention in climate change debates. In an area that is increasingly of concern to governments, NGOs and the general public, this timely research is crucial for developing effective responses to climate change.

If dog is a man's best friend, then a woman's best friend is her cat...or cats We are all aware of the stereotype by which every woman with more than one cat is judged, but why is it that caring is so often confused with crazy? On a cold wet day not long after twenty-eight year old Harriet falls in one fell swoop from happy wife to broken hearted divorc e, she finds a litter of abandoned kittens. Relating to their vulnerability as she peers into the soggy cardboard box, she decides to take them in and soon finds out that the perfect antidote for a broken heart is falling in love all over again. It isn't until her birthday that Harriet realises she has earned the official title of Crazy Cat Lady of the family and wondering whether life is conspiring against her, she decides on a whim to go on holiday to the Lake District. There she meets Dan, the answer to all her problems, but locked in a love triangle between boy, girl and cat, how long will Harriet's luck last? We have all fallen in love and had our hearts broken, but Harriet will never forget the four legged friends who stood beside her through it all.