Author: Saranne Bensusan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781999601805
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 336

View

Book Description
An Anthology of Stories following the lives of those living in a Dystopian future. Most of the lower classes are now forced to live in subterranean apartments with their daily lives scheduled by an A.I. system that they believe has been created to benefit humanity.

Author: Gaia Giuliani
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351064851
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 224

View

Book Description
Monsters, Catastrophes and the Anthropocene: A Postcolonial Critique explores European and Western imaginaries of natural disaster, mass migration and terrorism through a postcolonial inquiry into modern conceptions of monstrosity and catastrophe. This book uses established icons of popular visual culture in sci-fi, doomsday and horror films and TV series, as well as in images reproduced by the news media to help trace the genealogy of modern fears to ontologies and logics of the Anthropocene. By logics of the Anthropocene, the book refers to a set of principles based on ontologies of exploitation, extermination and natural resource exhaustion processes determining who is worthy of benefiting from value extraction and being saved from the catastrophe and who is expendable. Fears for the loss of isolation from the unworthy and the expendable are investigated here as originating anxieties against migrants’ invasions, terrorist attacks and planetary catastrophes, in a thread that weaves together re-emerging ‘past nightmares’ and future visions. This book will be of great interest to students and academics of the Environmental Humanities, Human and Cultural Geography, Political Philosophy, Psychosocial Studies, Postcolonial Studies and Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, Gender Studies and Postcolonial Feminist Studies, Cultural Studies, Sociology, Cultural Anthropology, Cinema Studies and Visual Studies.

Author: Leslie Sklair
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000263789
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 272

View

Book Description
This book offers the first systematic study of how the ‘Anthropocene’ is reported in mass media globally, drawing parallels between the use (or misuse) of the term and the media’s attitude towards the associated issues of climate change and global warming. Identifying the potential dangers of the Anthropocene provides a useful path into a variety of issues that are often ignored, misrepresented, or sidelined by the media. These dangers are widely discussed in the social sciences, environmental humanities, and creative arts, and this book includes chapters on how the contributions of these disciplines are reported by the media. Our results suggest that the natural science and mass media establishments, and the business and political interests which underpin them, tend to lean towards optimistic reassurance (the ‘good’ Anthropocene), rather than pessimistic alarmist stories, in reporting the Anthropocene. In this volume, contributors explore how dangerous this ‘neutralizing’ of the Anthropocene is in undermining serious global action in the face of the potential existential risks confronting humanity. The book presents results from media in more than 100 countries in all major languages across the globe. It covers the reporting of key environmental issues, such as the impact of climate change and global warming on oceans, forests, soil, biodiversity, and the biosphere. We offer explanations for differences and similarities in how the media report the Anthropocene in different regions of the world. In doing so, the book argues that, though it is still controversial, the idea of the Anthropocene helps to concentrate minds and behaviour in confronting ongoing ecological (and Coronavirus) crises. The Anthropocene in Global Media will be of interest to students and scholars of environmental studies, media and communication studies, and the environmental humanities, and all those who are concerned about the survival of humans on planet Earth.

Author: Mark Whitehead
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131785957X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 190

View

Book Description
From the depths of the oceans to the highest reaches of the atmosphere, the human impact on the environment is significant and undeniable. These forms of global and local environmental change collectively appear to signal the arrival of a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. This is a geological era defined not by natural environmental fluctuations or meteorite impacts, but by collective actions of humanity. Environmental Transformations offers a concise and accessible introduction to the human practices and systems that sustain the Anthropocene. It combines accounts of the carbon cycle, global heat balances, entropy, hydrology, forest ecology and pedology, with theories of demography, war, industrial capitalism, urban development, state theory and behavioural psychology. This book charts the particular role of geography and geographers in studying environmental change and its human drivers. It provides a review of critical theories that can help to uncover the socio-economic and political factors that influence environmental change. It also explores key issues in contemporary environmental studies, such as resource use, water scarcity, climate change, industrial pollution and deforestation. These issues are ‘mapped’ through a series of geographical case studies to illustrate the particular value of geographical notions of space, place and scale, in uncovering the complex nature of environmental change in different socio-economic, political and cultural contexts. Finally, the book considers the different ways in which nations, communities and individuals around the world are adapting to environmental change in the twenty-first century. Particular attention is given throughout to the uneven geographical opportunities that different communities have to adapt to environmental change and to the questions of social justice this situation raises. This book encourages students to engage in the scientific uncertainties that surround the study of environmental change, while also discussing both pessimistic and more optimistic views on the ability of humanity to address the environmental challenges of our current era.

Author: David R. Butler
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100052230X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 378

View

Book Description
This book is devoted to the Anthropocene, the period of unprecedented human impacts on Earth’s environmental systems, and illustrates how Geographers envision the concept of the Anthropocene. This edited volume illustrates that geographers have a diverse perspective on what the Anthropocene is and represents. The chapters also show that geographers do not feel it necessary to identify only one starting point for the temporal onset of the Anthropocene. Several starting points are suggested, and some authors support the concept of a time-transgressive Anthropocene. Chapters in this book are organized into six sections, but many of them transcend easy categorization and could easily have fit into two or even three different sections. Geographers embrace the concept of the Anthropocene while defining it and studying it in a variety of ways that clearly show the breadth and diversity of the discipline. This book will be of great value to scholars, researchers, and students interested in geography, environmental humanities, environmental studies, and anthropology. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Annals of the American Association of Geographers.

Author: Julia Adeney Thomas
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 150953461X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

View

Book Description
Humans rank with the powerful forces of nature transforming Earth. Since the mid-20th century, population growth, industrialization, and globalization have had such deep and wide-ranging impacts that our planet no longer functions as it did during the previous eleven millennia. So distinctive is this collective human intervention that a new geological interval has been proposed; it is called the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is intriguing scientifically, fascinating intellectually, and deeply disturbing politically, socially, economically, and ethically. We must learn how to co-exist sustainably with the rest of nature in what is emerging as a new planetary state. To do so, we must first understand what "Anthropocene" means in all its dimensions. This book adopts a multidisciplinary approach, starting with an exploration of the Anthropocene as a geological concept: ranging across the physical changes to the landscape, to the rapidly heating climate, to a biosphere undergoing transformation. And what of the "anthropos" in the Anthropocene? While geoscience does not normally address political and ethical issues of justice and equity, or economics and culture, Anthropocene studies in the humanities and social sciences investigate the complexities of the human activity driving global change. Here the book looks at human history, both in the deep past and more recently, the politics and economics of growth spurring the Anthropocene, and potential ways of mitigating its cruel effects. Our fragile, still beautiful, planet is finite. The new realities of the Anthropocene will need our best efforts, across disciplinary divides, at effective hope and action.

Author: Joel Alden Schlosser
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022670484X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 200

View

Book Description
We are living in the age of the Anthropocene, in which human activities are recognized for effecting potentially catastrophic environmental change. In this book, Joel Alden Schlosser argues that our current state of affairs calls for a creative political response, and he finds inspiration in an unexpected source: the ancient writings of the Greek historian Herodotus. Focusing on the Histories, written in the fifth century BCE, Schlosser identifies a cluster of concepts that allow us to better grasp the dynamic complexity of a world in flux. Schlosser shows that the Histories, which chronicle the interactions among the Greek city-states and their neighbors that culminated in the Persian Wars, illuminate a telling paradox: at those times when humans appear capable of exerting more influence than ever before, they must also assert collective agency to avoid their own downfall. Here, success depends on nomoi, or the culture, customs, and laws that organize human communities and make them adaptable through cooperation. Nomoi arise through sustained contact between humans and their surroundings and function best when practiced willingly and with the support of strong commitments to the equality of all participants. Thus, nomoi are the very substance of political agency and, ultimately, the key to freedom and ecological survival because they guide communities to work together to respond to challenges. An ingenious contribution to political theory, political philosophy, and ecology, Herodotus in the Anthropocene reminds us that the best perspective on the present can often be gained through the lens of the past.

Author: Helena Feder
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000405060
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 202

View

Book Description
Reading poetry and prose, images and art, literary and critical theory, science and cultural studies, Close Reading the Anthropocene explores the question of meaning, its importance and immanent potential for loss, in the new geological epoch of the Anthropocene. Both close reading and scientific ecology prioritize slowing down and looking around to apprehend similarities and differences, to recognize and value interconnections. Here "close" suggests careful attention to both the reading subject and read "object." Moving between places, rocks, plants, animals, atmosphere, and eclipses, this interdisciplinary edited collection grounds the complex relations between text and world in the environmental humanities. The volume’s wide-ranging chapters are critical, often polemical, engagements with the question of the Anthropocene and the changing conversation around reading, interpretation, and textuality. They exemplify a range of work from across the globe and will be of great interest to scholars and students of the environmental humanities, ecocriticism, and literary studies.

Author: Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478005580
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

View

Book Description
In Allegories of the Anthropocene Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey traces how indigenous and postcolonial peoples in the Caribbean and Pacific Islands grapple with the enormity of colonialism and anthropogenic climate change through art, poetry, and literature. In these works, authors and artists use allegory as a means to understand the multiscalar complexities of the Anthropocene and to critique the violence of capitalism, militarism, and the postcolonial state. DeLoughrey examines the work of a wide range of artists and writers—including poets Kamau Brathwaite and Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, Dominican installation artist Tony Capellán, and authors Keri Hulme and Erna Brodber—whose work addresses Caribbean plantations, irradiated Pacific atolls, global flows of waste, and allegorical representations of the ocean and the island. In examining how island writers and artists address the experience of finding themselves at the forefront of the existential threat posed by climate change, DeLoughrey demonstrates how the Anthropocene and empire are mutually constitutive and establishes the vital importance of allegorical art and literature in understanding our global environmental crisis.

Author: Sherilyn MacGregor
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1134601530
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 520

View

Book Description
The Routledge Handbook of Gender and Environment gathers together state-of-the-art theoretical reflections and empirical research from leading researchers and practitioners working in this transdisciplinary and transnational academic field. Over the course of the book, these contributors provide critical analyses of the gender dimensions of a wide range of timely and challenging topics, from sustainable development and climate change politics, to queer ecology and interspecies ethics in the so-called Anthropocene. Presenting a comprehensive overview of the development of the field from early political critiques of the male domination of women and nature in the 1980s to the sophisticated intersectional and inclusive analyses of the present, the volume is divided into four parts: Part I: Foundations Part II: Approaches Part III: Politics, policy and practice Part IV: Futures. Comprising chapters written by forty contributors with different perspectives and working in a wide range of research contexts around the world, this Handbook will serve as a vital resource for scholars, students, and practitioners in environmental studies, gender studies, human geography, and the environmental humanities and social sciences more broadly.