A multidisciplinary exploration of extinction and what comes next What comes after extinction? Including both prominent and unusual voices in current debates around the Anthropocene, this collection a
This book reflects the considerable appeal of the Anthropocene and the way it stimulates new discussions and ideas for reimagining sustainability and its place in education in these precarious times.
Addressing global environmental challenges from a peace ecology perspective, the present book offers peer-reviewed texts that build on the expanding field of peace ecology and applies this concept to
We live in the age of the Anthropocene: human activity is the dominant force affecting the climate and man-made and organic materials are becoming irreversibly intertwined. As natural resources dwindl
James Lovelock, creator of the Gaia hypothesis and the greatest environmental thinker of our time, has produced an astounding new theory about future of life on Earth. He argues that the anthropocene
A profound meditation on climate change and the Anthropocene and an urgent search for the fossils―industrial, chemical, geological―that humans are leaving behindWhat will the world look like ten thous
How far are we from the Lake District? How far from the garden? Eric Linsker’s first book scrolls down the Anthropocene, tracking our passage through a technophilic pastoral where work and play are bo
A reconception of the sublime to include experiences of disaster, war, outer space, virtual reality, and the Anthropocene. We experience the sublime―overwhelming amazement and exhilaration―in at least seven different forms. Gazing from the top of a mountain at a majestic vista is not the same thing as looking at a city from the observation deck of a skyscraper; looking at images constructed from Hubble Space Telescope data is not the same as living through a powerful earthquake. The varieties of sublime experience have increased during the last two centuries, and we need an expanded terminology to distinguish between them. In this book, David Nye delineates seven forms of the sublime: natural, technological, disastrous, martial, intangible, digital, and environmental, which express seven different relationships to space, time, and identity. These forms of the sublime can be experienced at historic sites, ruins, cities, national parks, or on the computer screen. We find them in beaut
Big World, Small Planet probes the urgent predicament of our times: how is it possible to create a positive future for both humanity and Earth? We have entered the Anthropocene—the era of massive huma
Theories of social-ecological resilience have developed over the past decades and rapidly become an important framework for governance of complex non-linear environmental problems. This book explores the resilience theories and their compatibility with law, it identifies corresponding legal features. The legal features identified, including legal measures, mechanisms, principles and approaches, form a legal design for social-ecological resilience. A legal design that can be applied to different governance situations. It can be a tool both for designing new laws, as well as for assessing the effectiveness of current laws and legal systems. In many ways environmental law has adjusted and developed new approaches to meet complex environmental problems, but law is still challenged by the complexity that characterize environmental problems and the environmental change connected with the Anthropocene. This book provides a comprehensive review of the most fundamental components of the governa
Geology as a science has a fascinating and controversial history. Kieran D. O'Hara's book provides a brief and accessible account of the major events in the history of geology over the last two hundred years, from early theories of Earth structure during the Reformation, through major controversies over the age of the Earth during the Industrial Revolution, to the more recent twentieth-century development of plate tectonic theory, and on to current ideas concerning the Anthropocene. Most chapters include a short 'text box' providing more technical and detailed elaborations on selected topics. The book also includes a history of the geology of the Moon, a topic not normally included in books on the history of geology. The book will appeal to students of Earth science, researchers in geology who wish to learn more about the history of their subject, and general readers interested in the history of science.
Slavoj Žižek is one of today’s leading theorists, whose polemical works span topics from German idealism to Lacanian psychoanalysis, from Shakespeare to Beckett, and from Hitchcock to Lynch. Critical through and through of both post-modern ideological complacencies―e.g., the death of the subject and the return to ethics―and pre-modern ones―e.g., the re-enchantment of the world, the embrace of postcritique―Žižek doubles down on the virtues of the modern, on what it means to be modern, and to ask modern questions (about the subject, nature, and political economy) in the age of the Anthropocene. This volume takes up the challenges laid out by Žižek’s iconoclastic thinking and its reverberations in an array of fields: philosophy, psychoanalysis, political theory, literary studies, and film studies, among others. Žižek’s multi-disciplinary appeal attests to the provocation, if not scandal, of his politically incorrect thought. Understanding Žižek, Understanding Modernism makes the force
Visions of utopia – some hopeful, others fearful – have become increasingly prevalent in recent times. This groundbreaking, timely book examines expressions of the utopian imagination with a focus on the pressing challenge of how to inhabit a climate-changed world. Forms of social dreaming are tracked across two domains: political theory and speculative fiction. The analysis aims to both uncover the key utopian and dystopian tendencies in contemporary debates around the Anthropocene; as well as to develop a political theory of radical transformation that avoids not only debilitating fatalism but also wishful thinking. This book juxtaposes theoretical interventions, from Bruno Latour to the members of the Dark Mountain collective, with fantasy and science fiction texts by N. K. Jemisin, Kim Stanley Robinson and Margaret Atwood, debating viable futures for a world that will look and feel very different from the one we live in right now.
The words 'Anthropocene animals' conjure pictures of dead albatrosses' bodies filled with plastic fragments, polar bears adrift on melting ice sheets, solitary elephants in the savannah. Suspended between the impersonal nature of the Great Extinction and the singularity of exotic individuals, these creatures appear remote, disconnected from us. But animals in the Anthropocene are not simply 'out there.' Threatening and threatened, they populate cities and countryside, often trapped in industrial farms, zoos, labs. Among them, there are humans, too. Italo Calvino's Animals explores Anthropocene animals through the visionary eyes of a classic modern author. In Calvino's stories, ants, cats, chickens, rabbits, gorillas, and other critters emerge as complex subjects and inhabitants of a world under siege. Beside them, another figure appears in the mirror: that of an anthropos without a capital A, epitome of subaltern humans with their challenges and inequalities, a companion species on the
In this volume, Mark Douglas offers a new vision of the history of Christian pacifism within the context of a warming world. He narrates this story in a way that recognizes the complexities of the tradition and aligns it with a coherent theological vision, one that shapes the tradition to encompass the new causes and types of wars fought during the Anthropocene. Along the way, Douglas draws from research in historical climatology to recover the overlooked role that climate changes have always played in shaping not only the Christian pacifist tradition but also the movement of traditions through western history. Scholars across a range of disciplines - peace studies, Christian theology and history, environmentalism, and environmental conflict studies - will benefit from this model of critical and charitable engagement with the complex history of Christian pacifism, the resources of which will be important for addressing wars in a warming world.
In this interdisciplinary work, philosophers from different specialisms connect with the notion of the wild today and interrogate how it is mediated through the culture of the Anthropocene. They make use of empirical material like specific artworks, films and other cultural works related to the term ‘wild’ to consider the aesthetic experience of nature, focusing on the untamed, the boundless, the unwieldy, or the unpredictable; in other words, aspects of nature that are mediated by culture. This book maps out the wide range of ways in which we experience the wildness of nature aesthetically, relating both to immediate experience as well as to experience mediated through cultural expression. A variety of subjects are relevant in this context, including aesthetics, art history, theology, human geography, film studies, and architecture. A theme that is pursued throughout the book is the wild in connection with ecology and its experience of nature as both a constructive and destructive for
Twelve visions of living in a climate-changed world.We are living in the Anthropocene―an era of dramatic and violent climate change featuring warming oceans, melting icecaps, extreme weather events, habitat loss, species extinction, and more. What will life be like in a climate-changed world? In Tomorrow’s Parties, science fiction authors speculate how we might be able to live and even thrive through the advancing Anthropocene. In ten original stories by writers from around the world, an interview with celebrated writer Kim Stanley Robinson, and a series of intricate and elegant artworks by Sean Bodley, Tomorrow’s Parties takes rational optimism as a moral imperative, or at least a pragmatic alternative to despair. In these stories―by writers from the United Kingdom, the United States, Nigeria, China, Bangladesh, and Australia―a young man steals from delivery drones; a political community lives on an island made of ocean-borne plastic waste; and a climate change denier tries to unmask
