Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities

Author: Jodi Frawley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113475616X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Book Description
Research from a humanist perspective has much to offer in interrogating the social and cultural ramifications of invasion ecologies. The impossibility of securing national boundaries against accidental transfer and the unpredictable climatic changes of our time have introduced new dimensions and hazards to this old issue. Written by a team of international scholars, this book allows us to rethink the impact on national, regional or local ecologies of the deliberate or accidental introduction of foreign species, plant and animal. Modern environmental approaches that treat nature with naïve realism or mobilize it as a moral absolute, unaware or unwilling to accept that it is informed by specific cultural and temporal values, are doomed to fail. Instead, this book shows that we need to understand the complex interactions of ecologies and societies in the past, present and future over the Anthropocene, in order to address problems of the global environmental crisis. It demonstrates how humanistic methods and disciplines can be used to bring fresh clarity and perspective on this long vexed aspect of environmental thought and practice. Students and researchers in environmental studies, invasion ecology, conservation biology, environmental ethics, environmental history and environmental policy will welcome this major contribution to environmental humanities.

Whole Earth Thinking and Planetary Coexistence

Author: Sam Mickey
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317497740
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Book Description
Like never before in history, humans are becoming increasingly interconnected with one another and with the other inhabitants and habitats of Earth. There are numerous signs of planetary interrelations, from social media and international trade to genetic engineering and global climate change. The scientific study of interrelations between organisms and environments, Ecology, is uniquely capable of addressing the complex challenges that characterize our era of planetary coexistence. Whole Earth Thinking and Planetary Coexistence focuses on newly emerging approaches to ecology that cross the disciplinary boundaries of sciences and humanities with the aim of responding to the challenges facing the current era of planetary interconnectedness. It introduces concepts that draw out a creative contrast between religious and secular approaches to the integration of sciences and humanities, with religious approaches represented by the "geologian" Thomas Berry and the whole Earth thinking of Stephanie Kaza and Gary Snyder, and the more secular approaches represented by the "geophilosophy" of poststructuralist theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. This book will introduce concepts engaging with the ecological challenges of planetary coexistence to students and professionals in fields of environmental studies, philosophy and religious studies.

Hope and Grief in the Anthropocene

Author: Lesley Head
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317576438
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
The Anthropocene is a volatile and potentially catastrophic age demanding new ways of thinking about relations between humans and the nonhuman world. This book explores how responses to environmental challenges are hampered by a grief for a pristine and certain past, rather than considering the scale of the necessary socioeconomic change for a 'future' world. Conceptualisations of human-nature relations must recognise both human power and its embeddedness within material relations. Hope is a risky and complex process of possibility that carries painful emotions; it is something to be practised rather than felt. As centralised governmental solutions regarding climate change appear insufficient, intellectual and practical resources can be derived from everyday understandings and practices. Empirical examples from rural and urban contexts and with diverse research participants - indigenous communities, climate scientists, weed managers, suburban householders - help us to consider capacity, vulnerability and hope in new ways.

Handbook of Cities and the Environment

Author: Kevin Archer
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1784712264
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 473

Book Description
With an ever-growing majority of the world's human population living in city spaces, the relationship between cities and nature will be one of the key environmental issues of the 21st Century. This book brings together a diverse set of authors to explore the various aspects of this relationship both theoretically and empirically. Rather than considering cities as wholly separate from nature, a running theme throughout the book is that cities, and city dwellers, should be characterized as intrinsic in the creation of specifically urban-generated ‘socio-natures’.

Risk, Disaster, and Vulnerability

Author: S. Ravi Rajan
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520392620
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 172

Book Description
Over the course of the past century, there has been a sustained reflective engagement about environmental risks, disasters, and human vulnerability in our modern industrial world. This inquiry has raised a host of crucial questions. Just how safe is humanity in a world of toxic chemicals and industrial installations that have destructive potential? Is it feasible to prevent large-scale catastrophes like the ones in Bhopal, Chernobyl, and Fukushima and smaller-scale disasters such as oil spills and gas leaks? How do environmental hazards affect social and political orders? S. Ravi Rajan expertly synthesizes decades of public policy and academic discourse on how societies measure and ultimately come to terms with risk, danger, and vulnerability and offers a fresh, humanistic perspective for grappling with the new global scale and interconnectedness of these threats.

Ecological Exile

Author: Derek Gladwin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317280113
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 398

Book Description
Ecological Exile explores how contemporary literature, film, and media culture confront ecological crises through perspectives of spatial justice – a facet of social justice that looks at unjust circumstances as a phenomenon of space. Growing instances of flooding, population displacement, and pollution suggest an urgent need to re-examine the ways social and geographical spaces are perceived and valued in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Maintaining that ecological crises are largely socially produced, Derek Gladwin considers how British and Irish literary and visual texts by Ian McEwan, Sarah Gavron, Eavan Boland, John McGrath, and China Miéville, among others, respond to and confront various spatial injustices resulting from fossil fuel production and the effects of climate change. This ambitious book offers a new spatial perspective in the environmental humanities by focusing on what the philosopher Glenn Albrecht has termed 'solastalgia' – a feeling of homesickness caused by environmental damage. The result of solastalgia is that people feel paradoxically ecologically exiled in the places they continue to live because of destructive environmental changes. Gladwin skilfully traces spatially produced instances of ecological injustice that literally and imaginatively abolish people’s sense of place (or place-home). By looking at two of the most pressing social and environmental concerns – oil and climate – Ecological Exile shows how literary and visual texts have documented spatially unjust effects of solastalgia. This interdisciplinary book will appeal to students, scholars, and professionals studying literary, film, and media texts that draw on environment and sustainability, cultural geography, energy cultures, climate change, and social justice.

Unstable Relations

Author: Eve Vincent
Publisher: Apollo Books
ISBN: 9781742588780
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 404

Book Description
The 1970s witnessed the emergence of a global environmental movement in response to rampant resource extraction. This moment gave rise to a celebrated 'green-black alliance' between environmentalists and Indigenous groups in Australia. However, in recent years, this relationship has come under increased critical scrutiny, spurred in part by the global mining boom and continuing concerns about the effects of climate change. This edited collection brings together leading anthropologists, social scientists, activists, and writers to subject the Indigenous-environmentalist relation to rigorous, empirical inquiry, and to explore noted controversies, campaigns, and key issues, such as: the Wild Rivers Act and James Price Point, mining, native title rights, 'feral' species, forestry, national parks, and payment for environmental services. The insights generated here have relevance beyond Australia as scholars investigate the politics of indigeneity in the present moment, and consider the economic future of Indigenous minorities. Significantly, the collection involves both Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors, subjecting environmentalists to a kind of anthropological analysis. [Subject: Environmental Studies, Politics, Indigenous Studies]

Animals Count

Author: Nancy Cushing
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351210629
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 222

Book Description
Whether their populations are perceived as too large, just right, too small or non-existent, animal numbers matter to the humans with whom they share environments. Animals in the right numbers are accepted and even welcomed, but when they are seen to deviate from the human-declared set point, they become either enemies upon whom to declare war or victims to be protected. In this edited volume, leading and emerging scholars investigate for the first time the ways in which the size of an animal population impacts how they are viewed by humans and, conversely, how human perceptions of populations impact animals. This collection explores the fortunes of amphibians, mammals, insects and fish whose numbers have created concern in settler Australia and examines shifts in these populations between excess, abundance, equilibrium, scarcity and extinction. The book points to the importance of caution in future campaigns to manipulate animal populations, and demonstrates how approaches from the humanities can be deployed to bring fresh perspectives to understandings of how to live alongside other animals.

National Park Science

Author: Jane Carruthers
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108127479
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 563

Book Description
South Africa is renowned for its wildlife and environmental conservation in iconic national parks such as the Kruger, one of the world's first formal protected areas. However, this is the first book to thoroughly analyse and explain the interesting and changing scientific research that has been accomplished in South Africa's national parks during the twentieth century. Providing a fascinating and thorough historical narrative based on an extensive range of sources, this text details the evolution of traditional natural history pursuits to modern conservation science in South Africa, covering all research areas of conservation biology and all the national parks around the country. It reveals the interaction between the international context, government, learning institutions and the public that has shaped the present conservation arena. A complex story that will interest and inform not only those involved in conservation science of South Africa, but worldwide.

Nature, Environment and Poetry

Author: Susanna Lidström
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131768284X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 231

Book Description
The environmental challenges facing humanity in the twenty-first century are not only acute and grave, they are also unprecedented in kind, complexity and scope. Nonetheless, or therefore, the political response to problems such as climate change, biodiversity loss and widespread pollution continues to fall short. To address these challenges it seems clear that we need new ways of thinking about the relationship between humans and nature, local and global, and past, present and future. One place to look for such new ideas is in poetry, designed to contain multiple levels of meaning at once, challenge the imagination, and evoke responses that are based on something more than scientific consensus and rationale. This ecocritical book traces the environmental sensibilities of two Anglophone poets; Nobel Prize-winner Seamus Heaney (1939-2013), and British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes (1930-1998). Drawing on recent and multifarious developments in ecocritical theory, it examines how Hughes's and Heaney's respective poetics interact with late twentieth century developments in environmental thought, focusing in particular on ideas about ecology and environment in relation to religion, time, technology, colonialism, semiotics, and globalisation. This book is aimed at students of literature and environment, the relationship between poetry and environmental humanities, and the poetry of Ted Hughes or Seamus Heaney