The Environmental Humanities and the Ancient World

The Environmental Humanities and the Ancient World
Author: Christopher Schliephake
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 134
Release: 2020-07-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108802370

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What can a study of antiquity contribute to the interdisciplinary paradigm of the environmental humanities? And how does this recent paradigm influence the way we perceive human-'nature' interactions in pre-modernity? By asking these and a number of related questions, this Element aims to show why the ancient tradition still matters in the Anthropocene. Offering new perspectives to think about what directions the ecological turn could take in classical studies, it revisits old material, including ancient Greek religion and mythology, with central concepts of contemporary environmental theory. It also critically engages with forms of classical reception in current debates, arguing that ancient ecological knowledge is a powerful resource for creating alternative world views.

Environmental Humanities

Environmental Humanities
Author: Sjoerd Kluiving
Publisher:
Total Pages: 108
Release: 2021-04-28
Genre:
ISBN: 9789464270044

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There has been an increasing archaeological interest in human-animal-nature relations, where archaeology has shifted from a focus on deciphering meaning, or understanding symbols and the social construction of the landscape to an acknowledgment of how things, places, and the environment contribute with their own agencies to the shaping of relations.This means that the environment cannot be regarded as a blank space that landscape meaning is projected onto. Parallel to this, the field of environmental humanities poses the question of how to work with the intermeshing of humans and their surroundings.To allow the environment back in as an active agent of change, means that landscape archaeology can deal better with issues such as global warming, an escalating loss of biodiversity, as well as increasingly toxic environment. However, this does not leave human agency out of the equation. It is humans who reinforce the environmental challenges of today.The scholarly field of the humanities deal with questions like how is meaning attributed, what cultural factors drive human action, what role is played by ethics, how is landscape experienced emotionally, as well as how concepts derived from art, literature, and history function in such processes of meaning attribution and other cultural processes. This humanities approach is of utmost importance when dealing with climate and environmental challenges ahead and we need a new landscape archaeology that meets these challenges, but also that meets well across disciplinary boundaries. Here inspiration can be found in discussions with scholars in the emerging field of Environmental Humanities.

Timescales

Timescales
Author: Bethany Wiggin
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2020-01-05
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1452963681

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Humanists, scientists, and artists collaborate to address the disjunctive temporalities of ecological crisis In 2016, Antarctica’s Totten Glacier, formed some 34 million years ago, detached from its bedrock, melted from the bottom by warming ocean waters. For the editors of Timescales, this event captures the disjunctive temporalities of our era’s—the Anthropocene’s—ecological crises: the rapid and accelerating degradation of our planet’s life-supporting environment established slowly over millennia. They contend that, to represent and respond to these crises (i.e., climate change, rising sea levels, ocean acidification, species extinction, and biodiversity loss) requires reframing time itself, making more visible the relationship between past, present, and future, and between a human life span and the planet’s. Timescales’ collection of lively and thought-provoking essays puts oceanographers, geophysicists, geologists, and anthropologists into conversation with literary scholars, art historians, and archaeologists. Together forging new intellectual spaces, they explore the relationship between geological deep time and historical particularity, between ecological crises and cultural expression, between environmental policy and social constructions, between restoration ecology and future imaginaries, and between constructive pessimism and radical (and actionable) hope. Interspersed among these essays are three complementary “etudes,” in which artists describe experimental works that explore the various timescales of ecological crisis. Contributors: Jason Bell, Harvard Law School; Iemanjá Brown, College of Wooster; Beatriz Cortez, California State U, Northridge; Wai Chee Dimock, Yale U; Jane E. Dmochowski, U of Pennsylvania; David A. D. Evans, Yale U; Kate Farquhar; Marcia Ferguson, U of Pennsylvania; Ömür Harmanşah, U of Illinois at Chicago; Troy Herion; Mimi Lien; Mary Mattingly; Paul Mitchell, U of Pennsylvania; Frank Pavia, California Institute of Technology; Dan Rothenberg; Jennifer E. Telesca, Pratt Institute; Charles M. Tung, Seattle U.

An Environmental History of Ancient Greece and Rome

An Environmental History of Ancient Greece and Rome
Author: Lukas Thommen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 199
Release: 2012-03-08
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1107002168

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Lively and accessible account of the relationship between man and nature in Graeco-Roman antiquity. Describes the ways in which the Greeks and Romans intervened in the environment and thus traces the history of tension between the exploitation of resources and the protection of nature.

Ecocriticism, Ecology, and the Cultures of Antiquity

Ecocriticism, Ecology, and the Cultures of Antiquity
Author: Christopher Schliephake
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 391
Release: 2016-12-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 1498532853

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Although current environmental debates lay the focus on the Industrial Revolution as a sociopolitical development that has led to the current environmental crisis, many ecocritical projects have avoided historicizing their concepts or have been characterized by approaches that were either pre-historic or post-historic: while the environmental movement has harbored the dream of restoring nature to a state untouched by human hands, there is also the pessimistic vision of a post-apocalyptic world, exhausted by humanity’s consumption of natural resources. Against this background, the decline of nature has become a narrative template quite common among the public environmental discourse and environmental scientists alike. The volume revisits Antiquity as an epoch which witnessed similar environmental problems and came up with its own interpretations and solutions in dealing with them. This decidedly historical perspective is not only supposed to fill in a blank in ecocritical discourse, but also to question, problematize, and inform our contemporary debates with a completely different take on “nature” and humanity’s place in the world. Thereby, a productive dialogue between contemporary ecocritical theories and the classical tradition is established that highlights similarities as well as differences. This volume is the first book to bring ecocriticism and the classical tradition into a comprehensive dialogue. It assembles recognized experts in the field and advanced scholars as well as young and aspiring ecocritics. In order to ensure a dialogic exchange between the contributions, the volume includes four response essays by established ecocritics which embed the sections within a larger theoretical and practical ecocritical framework and discuss the potential of including the pre-modern world into our environmental debates.

The Environmental Humanities

The Environmental Humanities
Author: Robert S. Emmett
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2017-10-13
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0262342308

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A concise overview of this multidisciplinary field, presenting key concepts, central issues, and current research, along with concrete examples and case studies. The emergence of the environmental humanities as an academic discipline early in the twenty-first century reflects the growing conviction that environmental problems cannot be solved by science and technology alone. This book offers a concise overview of this new multidisciplinary field, presenting concepts, issues, current research, concrete examples, and case studies. Robert Emmett and David Nye show how humanists, by offering constructive knowledge as well as negative critique, can improve our understanding of such environmental problems as global warming, species extinction, and over-consumption of the earth's resources. They trace the genealogy of environmental humanities from European, Australian, and American initiatives, also showing its cross-pollination by postcolonial and feminist theories. Emmett and Nye consider a concept of place not synonymous with localism, the risks of ecotourism, and the cultivation of wild areas. They discuss the decoupling of energy use and progress, and point to OECD countries for examples of sustainable development. They explain the potential for science to do both good and harm, examine dark visions of planetary collapse, and describe more positive possibilities—alternative practices, including localization and degrowth. Finally, they examine the theoretical impact of new materialism, feminism, postcolonial criticism, animal studies, and queer ecology on the environmental humanities.

Other Natures

Other Natures
Author: Clara Bosak-Schroeder
Publisher:
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2020
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520343484

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Sources and methods -- Rulers and rivers -- Female feck -- Dietary entanglements -- Resisting luxury -- After the encounter -- Transformation in the natural history museum.

Humanities for the Environment

Humanities for the Environment
Author: Joni Adamson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 445
Release: 2016-11-10
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1317283651

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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 and environmental challenges of our time. With the still controversial concept of the 'Anthropocene' as a starting point for a widening conversation, contributors range across geographies, ecosystems, climates and weather regimes; moving from icy, melting Arctic landscapes to the bleaching Australian Great Barrier Reef, and from an urban pedagogical 'laboratory' in Phoenix, Arizona to Vatican City in Rome. Chapters explore the ways in which humanists, in collaboration with communities and disciplines across academia, are responding to warming oceans, disappearing islands, collapsing fisheries, evaporating reservoirs of water, exploding bushfires, and spreading radioactive contamination. This interdisciplinary work will be of great interest to scholars in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences interested in interdisciplinary questions of environment and culture.

Hydrohumanities

Hydrohumanities
Author: Kim De Wolff
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2021-12-21
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0520380452

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Introduction : hydrohumanities / Kim De Wolff and Rina C. Faletti I. -- The agency of water and the Canal du Midi / Chandra Mukerji -- Winnipeg's aspirational port and the future of Arctic shipping (the geo-cultural version) / Stephanie C. Kane -- Radical water / Irene Klaver -- Water, extractivism, biopolitics, and Latin American indigeneity in Arguedas's Los ríos profundos and Potdevin's Palabrero / Ignacio López-Calvo and Hugo A. López Chavolla -- Water as the medium of measurement : mapping global oceans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries / Penelope Hardy -- Aquapelagic malolos : Island-water imaginaries in Coastal Bulacan, Philippines / Kale Bantigue Fajardo -- The invisible sinking surface: hydrogeology, fieldwork, and photography in California / Rina C. Faletti -- Irrigated gardens of the Indus River Basin : toward a cultural model for water resource management / James Wescoat and Abubakr Muhammed -- Leadership in principle : uniting nations to recognize the cultural value of water / Veronica Strang.

Ecology and Empire

Ecology and Empire
Author: Tom Griffiths
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 1997
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 9780295976679

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Ecology and Empire forged a historical partnership of great power -- and one which, particularly in the last 500 years, radically changed human and natural history across the globe. This book scrutinizes European expansion from the perspectives of the so-called colonized peripheries, the settler societies. It begins with Australia as a prism through which to consider the relations between settlers and their lands, but moves well beyond this to a range of lands of empire. It uses their distinctive ecologies and histories to shed new light on both the imperial and the settler environmental experience. Ecology and Empire also explores the way in which the science of ecology itself was an artifact of empire, drawing together the fields of imperial history and the history of science.