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Thinking Like a Parrot
From two experts on wild parrot cognition, a close look at the intelligence, social behavior, and conservation of these widely threatened birds. People form enduring emotional bonds with other animal species, such as dogs, cats, and horses. For the most part, these are domesticated animals, with one notable exception: many people form close and supportive relationships with parrots, even though these amusing and curious birds remain thoroughly wild creatures. What enables this unique group of animals to form social bonds with people, and what does this mean for their survival? In Thinking like a Parrot, Alan B. Bond and Judy Diamond look beyond much of the standard work on captive parrots to...
The Last of Its Kind
How an iconic bird’s final days exposed the reality of human-caused extinction The great auk is one of the most tragic and documented examples of extinction. A flightless bird that bred primarily on the remote islands of the North Atlantic, the last of its kind were killed in Iceland in 1844. Gísli Pálsson draws on firsthand accounts from the Icelanders who hunted the last great auks to bring to life a bygone age of Victorian scientific exploration while offering vital insights into the extinction of species. Pálsson vividly recounts how British ornithologists John Wolley and Alfred Newton set out for Iceland to collect specimens only to discover that the great auks were already gone. A...
Now Is Not the Time
Human beings have an overwhelming tendency to overemphasize the significance of the present without considering context or historical perspective. For many, here and now is as good as it gets - we have steadily progressed from a savage past, and all we have to look forward to is the great unknown. But if our literature and cinema are anything to go by, many are convinced that the future will indeed be dystopian. At the same time, arguments abound that living in the moment is a key to happiness and success. However, to privilege the present over the past or future, Brett Bowden argues, is to engage in tempocentrism. More than a mere preoccupation with the present, tempocentrism involves compa...
Digitisation and Low-Carbon Energy Transitions
The world is digitising as the need for low-carbon transitions gains urgency. Decarbonising energy requires the digital process control of energy production, transmission and end use. Diversified electrification across sectors requires real-time digital coordination of distributed energy production, At the same time, digitisation is accompanied by significant increases in energy demand, partly compensated through energy efficiency gains. The emergent linkages between digitisation and decarbonisation that constitute and enable the twin transition are the subject of this book. The collection features authors from across the social sciences who situate digitisation and low-carbon energy transitions in the socio-technical and political economic contexts in which they unfold, to offer insights on the dynamics and contingencies of digitisation in and beyond the energy sector. This is an open access book.
A Multidisciplinary Approach to Pandemics
This edited volume provides a comparative analysis of the ways in which pandemics are theorized and studied across several disciplines.
Oil Beach
Can the stories of bananas, whales, sea birds, and otters teach us to reconsider the seaport as a place of ecological violence, tied to oil, capital, and trade? San Pedro Bay, which contains the contiguous Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, is a significant site for petroleum shipping and refining as well as one of the largest container shipping ports in the world—some forty percent of containerized imports to the United States pass through this so-called America’s Port. It is also ecologically rich. Built atop a land- and waterscape of vital importance to wildlife, the heavily industrialized Los Angeles Harbor contains estuarial wetlands, the LA River mouth, and a marine ecology where...
Art-Based Research in the Context of a Global Pandemic
Living through the Covid-19 global pandemic has changed the way that we experience our lives, the way that we relate to one-another, and the way that we engage with the world. Focusing contextually on the initial lockdowns of the pandemic in 2020, this book proposes that art-based research has a central, illuminative role to play in our understanding of unfolding crises. The changes brought on by the global event may not be readily accessible or expressible through traditional academic research. Art-based research offers the opportunity to explore, document, and reflect on the emerging and often ineffable qualities of transformed lives by drawing on emotional, bodily, and interactive aspects...
Indian Feminist Ecocriticism
Following Françoise d’Eaubonne’s creation of the term “ecofeminism” in 1974, scholars around the world have explored ways that the degradation of the environment and the subjugation of women are linked. In the nearly three decades since the publication of the classical work Ecofeminism by Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva in 1993, several collections have appeared that apply ecofeminism to literary criticism, also known as feminist ecocriticism. The most recent of these include anthologies that emphasize international perspectives, furthering the comparative task launched by Mies and Shiva. To date, however, there have been no books devoted to gaining a broad-based understanding of feminist ecocriticism in India, understood in its own terms. Our new volume Indian Feminist Ecocriticism offers a survey of literature as seen through an ecofeminist lens by Indian scholars, which places contemporary literary analysis through a sampling of its diverse languages and in the context of millennia-old mythic traditions of India.
Companion Species
This book explores the connection between saints and animals, and how the power over animals has been a characteristic of saints from their beginnings in the Early Church. The connection between saints and humans is examined, with the saint as a human rising beyond humanity, touching the divine, and the non-human animal as a creature, which is connected to and yet removed from humanity and which may have a connection to the sacred itself. This volume transcends traditional religious boundaries by including Christian saints as well as similar figures in Islam and Norse religions. It operates on the cusp of two exciting and innovative fields: hagiographic and animal studies. It shows the complexities of human-animal interaction and the sacred: authorities clashing with experiential knowledge, metaphorical animals as opposed to real, animals ranging from helpers or opponents of saints, disguises of demons, or identity markers of a human community. Companion Species will be of value to scholars and students interested in medieval history, Europe, and religion, as well as social and cultural history.
Life's Edge
‘This book is not just about life, but about discovery itself. It is about error and hubris, but also about wonder and the reach of science. And it is bookended with the ultimate question: How do we define the thing that defines us?’ – Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Gene We all assume we know what life is, but the more scientists learn about the living world – from protocells to brains, from zygotes to pandemic viruses – the harder they find it to locate the edges of life, where it begins and ends. What exactly does it mean to be alive? Is a virus alive? Is a foetus? Carl Zimmer investigates one of the biggest questions of all: What is life? The answer seems obvious until you ...
