Bøker i Environment and Society-serien

This book freshly explores the ways in which green versions of an ancient, darkly admonishing yet graced tradition of Jeremiad prophecy have figured throughout various historical periods and genres of American writing, all the way to the climate fiction of our own day.

In Earth Polyphony, Suhasini Vincent analyzes the theory of ecocriticism in its entirety, and its existence in the global paradigm of climate change. Vincent shows how a polyphony of voices can affect law and decision making in the era of the Anthropocene, and aptly shows how voices can coexist as in Bakhtinian polyphony where multiple perspectives coexist despite contradictions and differences.Vincent argues that both material and non-material worlds are endowed with storied forms of knowledge that prompt ecocritical writers to engage in new experimental modes of expression. She explores the 'material turn', the 'animal turn' and the 'narrative turn' to highlight how law meets literature, prompts eco-activism, and how these crisscrossing narratives influence each other to spark judicial activism in forums around the planet.

The volume examines forms and functions of fictional and factual anticipatory environmental (hi)stories from antiquity to the Anthropocene, offering a diachronic as well as cross-cultural perspective on how different authors and societies have imagined their respective future environments.

This book re-envisions the cosmos with the holistic, spherical imagination of the Middle Ages, figured in circles, cycles, epicycles, equants, and offers a new perspective on the power of images and metaphors to shape the way humans see the universe and their own role in it.

This book provides the latest scholarship on the various methods and approaches being used by environmental humanists to incorporate geomedia into their research and analyses, examining how these new methodologies impact the production of knowledge in this field of study and promoting the impact of First Nation people perspectives.

Living Deep Ecology: A Bioregional Journey is an exploration of our evolving relationship with a specific bioregion. It is set in Humboldt County in northwestern California, in the Klamath-Siskiyou bioregion. By focusing on a specific bioregion and reflecting on anthropogenic changes in this bioregion over three decades, Bill Devall engages the reader in asking deeper questions about the meaning we find in Nature. He addresses questions such as how do we relate the facts and theories presented by science with our feelings, our intimacy, and our sense of Place as we dwell in a specific bioregion. This book engages the reader to consider our place in Nature. Devall approaches the bioregion not from the perspective of agencies and government, but from the perspective of the landscape itself.

In Wetlands and Western Cultures: Denigration to Conservation, Rod Giblett examines the portrayal of wetlands in Western culture and argues for their conservation. Giblett's analysis of the wetland motif in literature and the arts, including in Beowulf and the writings of Tolkien and Thoreau, demonstrates two approaches to wetlandstheir denigration as dead waters or their commendation as living waters with a potent cultural history.

We live in a digitalized world that is experiencing environmental changes, scarcity of natural resources, global pandemics, mass migrations, and burgeoning global populations. In Ecology, Artificial Intelligence, and Virtual Reality, Sing C. Chew proposes that we meet these challenges by examining the connected global world we live in and by considering the advances that have been made in digitalization, miniaturization, dematerialization, artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented realities, and machine learning, which have increased our socioeconomic and political productivity. Chew outlines potential structural avenues to address these challenges, suggests pragmatic choices to ease living during these chaotic crisis conditions, and outlines solutions that will enable us to traverse systemic crises.

Now in its second edition, Global Capitalism and Climate Change: The Need for an Alternative World System examines anthropogenic climate change in the context of global capitalism, a political economy that emphasizes profit-making, is committed to on-going economic growth, results in massive social inequality, fosters a treadmill of production and consumption, and is heavily reliant on fossil fuels. Looking ahead, Hans A. Baer explores the systemic changes necessary to create a more socially just, democratic, and environmentally sustainable world system capable of moving humanity toward a safer climate. This book is recommended for readers interested in anti-systemic efforts, including eco-anarchism, eco-feminism, the de-growth perspective, Indigenous voices, and the climate justice movement.

Ecomobilities examines the ideological connections between automobiles, the environment, and the end of the world, focusing on the car's inseparability from modern life. Through popular films addressing both mobilities and environmental disasters, Ecomobilities reveals how American automobility has influenced responses to warming temperatures and shifting ecosystems.

Humanity is struggling with the environmental destruction and social change caused by modern technologies like nuclear reactors. Politicians, scientists, and business leaders all too often revert to a tried and tested set of solutions that fails to grasp the wicked nature of the problem. Eschewing the problem-solving approach that dominates the nuclear energy debate, Anna Volkmar suggests that the only intelligent way to account for the inherent complexity of nuclear technology is not by trying to resolve it but to muddle through it. Through in-depth analyses of contemporary visual art, Volkmar demonstrates how art can suggest ways to muddle through these issues intelligently and ethically. This book is recommended for students and scholars of art history, anthropology, social science, ecocriticism, and philosophy.

This book examines the vital role of swamps in the making of Australian culture, history, society, community, and language. The volume highlights the importance of the wetlands to indigenous Australian cultures, nineteenth-century European explorers and settlers, and contemporary conservationists and ecologists.

Embodied Memories, Embedded Healing foregrounds the East Asian cultural beliefs and practices that shape the environmental consciousness of the twenty-first century. In highlighting such influences, this anthology also foregrounds the closely related new and exciting directions in ecocriticism.

Contesting Extinctions: Decolonial and Regenerative Futures critically interrogates the discursive framing of extinctions and how they relate to the systems that bring about biocultural loss.

Ecological Solidarity and the Kurdish Freedom Movement: Thought, Practice, Challenges, and Opportunities examines Kurdish ecological politics and its modeling of communalism and environmental justice, which offer important insights into democratic renewal and women's liberation for the West.

In Portland's Good Life, R. Bruce Stephenson discusses how Portland's investment in sustainability helped stave off climate change and COVID-19. Stephenson tells the timeless story of the city's private citizens who, devoted to the public good and grounded in the good life, built a city that honors their humanity.

In Nuclear Weapons and the Environment, John Perry highlights the grave risks associated with the continued proliferation of nuclear weapons, pointing not just to the dangers to human life but to the severe environmental damage caused by nuclear device testing.

Sustainable Engineering for Life Tomorrow examines the future of sustainable engineering and architecture. The contributors' analyses of sustainable solutions, such as wind and solar power, offer valuable insights fur future policy-making, scholarship, and the management of energy-intensive facilities.

This book highlights the environmental challenges that India faces due largely to high population and limited natural resources, making larger implications about environmental issues in developing countries and the role of the judiciary system when tackling these problems.

This book explores the political ecology of motor vehicles in an era of growing social disparities and environmental crises. Humanity needs to move beyond motor vehicles as much as possible as part and parcel of the larger process of radical social structural changes.

Taking an anthroplogical approach, this work examines the relationship between human culture and human ecology. It considers how a cultural approach to the study of environmental issues differs from the established approaches to these issues made in social science.

The relationship between scientific understanding and the different ways in which people "make sense" of environmental concerns is documented in this guide. The existence of more "contextual" forms of knowledge and understanding in relation to environmental policy is examined.

This volume traces the emergence of the environmental humanities as a scholarly discipline and advocates for the social, political, and public relevance of the field.