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More than a decade ago, Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen first suggested that we were now living in the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch in which human dominance of biological, chemical and geological processes on Earth was already an undeniable reality. Crutzen's ideas inspired Christian Schwagerl to do further documentation and to write this stimulating book. Well-equipped to take on such a task, Schwagerl has been a political, science and environmental journalist for more than 20 years. He first studied biology at the University of Berlin, completing his Master of Science degree at the University of Reading (UK). He is a past winner of the Georg von Holtzbrinck Prize for Science Journalism, the IUCN-Reuters Media Awards for excellence in Environmental Reporting (Category Europe, together with Philip Bethge and Rafaela von Bredow) and the Econsense Journalism Award for sustainability.
Defined as an ecological epoch in which humans have the most impact on the environment, the Anthropocene poses challenging questions to literary and cultural studies. If, in the Anthropocene, the distinction between nature and culture increasingly collapses, we have to rethink our division between historiography and natural history, as well as notions of the subject and of agency since the Enlightenment. This anthology collects papers from literary and cultural studies that address various issues surrounding the topic. Even though the new epoch seems to require a collective self-understanding as a unified species, readings of the Anthropocene and conceptualizations of human-nature relationsh...
Explores the significance of the Anthropocene for environmental politics, analysing political concepts in view of contemporary environmental challenges.
This volume presents the first collection of essays dedicated to the science fiction of microbiologist Joan Slonczewski. Posthuman Biopolitics consolidates the scholarly literature on Slonczewski’s fiction and demonstrates fruitful lines of engagement for the critical, cultural, and theoretical treatment of her characters, plots, and storyworlds. Her novels treat feminism in relation to scientific practice, resistance to domination, pacifism versus militarism, the extension of human rights to nonhuman and posthuman actors, biopolitics and posthuman ethics, and symbiosis and communication across planetary scales. Posthuman Biopolitics explores the breadth and depth of Joan Slonczewski’s vision, uncovering the reflective ethical practice that informs her science fiction.
This volume addresses emerging concerns and pivotal problems about our planet’s environment and ecology. The contributions gathered here highlight the inter-relation of topics and expertise regarding a vision for a healthy planet, agriculture and food, health and the environment, global issues, and generational perspectives. The book concludes with an ethical analysis of the multiple and over-lapping challenges that require urgent attention and long-term resolution. It will appeal to scholars and students in a variety of disciplines and fields that deal with the earth’s survival and flourishing.
Climate change fiction to some extent is all about the imagination and representation of the dark Anthropocene, which demonstrates writers’ concerns and anxieties of the predicament humanity might face resulting from dramatic climate change. This book selects and delves into some most crucial climate change novels analyzing how climate change and its consequences are imagined and represented by Western writers from the perspective of risks, community, imagology in the phase of Anthropocene 3.0.
Humanities for the Environment, or HfE, is an ambitious project that from 2013-2015 was funded by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The project networked universities and researchers internationally through a system of 'observatories'. This book collects the work of contributors networked through the North American, Asia-Pacific, and Australia-Pacific observatories. Humanities for the Environment showcases how humanists are working to 'integrate knowledges' from diverse cultures and ontologies and pilot new 'constellations of practice' that are moving beyond traditional contemplative or reflective outcomes (the book, the essay) towards solutions to the greatest social an...
As Obama nears the middle of his first-term as president Paul Street assesses his performance against the expectations of his supporters. While mainstream journalists have noted discrepancies between Obama's original vision and reality, Paul Street uniquely measures Obama's record against the expectations of the truly progressive agenda many of his supporters expected him to follow. Taken together, the list of Obama's weakened policies is startling: his business-friendly measures with the economy, the lack of support for the growing mass of unemployed and poor, the dilution of his health reform agenda, the passage of a record-setting Pentagon budget, and escalation of US military violence in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Street's account reveals these and many other indications of how deeply beholden Obama is to existing dominant domestic and global hierarchies and doctrines.
This volume discusses gardens as designed landscapes of mediation between nature and culture, embodying different levels of human control over wilderness, defining specific rules for this confrontation and staging different forms of human dominance. The contributing authors focus on ways of rethinking the garden and its role in contemporary society, using it as a crossover platform between nature, science and technology. Drawing upon their diverse fields of research, including History of Science and Technology, Environmental Studies, Gardens and Landscape Studies, Urban Studies, and Visual and Artistic Studies, the authors unveil various entanglements woven in the past between nature and culture, and probe the potential of alternative epistemologies to escape the predicament of fatalistic dystopias that often revolve around the Anthropocene debate. This book will be of great interest to those studying environmental and landscape history, the history of science and technology, historical geography, and the environmental humanities.