Natur

What do fishing with an otter, sitting atop a mountain at dawn with eighty Taiwanese backpackers, and driving home from Aldo Leopold's Shack have to say about the evolution of a personal environmental philosophy? Essays to My Daughter on Our Relationship With the Natural World provides a series of reflections by an environmental educator about lessons learned from time spent in nature. Originally conceived as personal letters to the author's daughter, this collection presents ethical questions outdoor enthusiasts regularly face as they work and play in the natural world. The essays in this book explore environmentalism in a modern-day context, with topics including sustainability education, the current relevance of environmental writers from the past, and the uncertainty of what is meant by words like "naturalist," "solitude," and "wilderness." There is no attempt to direct readers to any particular environmental philosophy. Instead, Simpson encourages readers to articulate their own perspective based on personal experiences in nature. Though Essays to My Daughter is written by a father to his daughter, the insights within the volume-and the questions they provoke-are valuable to all members of the next generation as they grapple with their own relationship to the natural world.

In The End of the Anthropocene, Michael J. Gormley examines late-stage Anthropocene literature and the imagining of the Astropocene. Focusing on science fiction literature, Gormley frames a changing ecoethic for the end of the Anthropocene.

Henry David Thoreau spent his life as an intellectual vagrant, jumping fences, pushing boundaries, and crossing borders. How, why, and to what end are the questions asked by contributors to this new volume of essays, whose work crosses national and disciplinary borders to think about Thoreau anew. Deliberately invoking Thoreau's commitment to "living a border life," a life located between the world of nature and that of the polis, these varied essays explore the writer's thinking and writing as situated not merely against, but across and beyond borders and boundaries -- whether geographic, temporal, or spiritual. Arguing that literary texts are governed by mediation and dialogue, lines of force becoming lines of connection that entail complex patterns and interweavings, the contributors draw on methodologies that freely combine literary and philosophical approaches with cultural and political ones -- in turn moving us beyond borders.Contributors include the volume editors as well as Kristen Case, Danielle Follett, Rochelle Johnson, John J. Kucich, Daniel S. Malachuk, Henrik Otterberg, Sandra Harbert Petrulionis, Benjamin Pickford, David M. Robinson, Christa Holm Vogelius, and Michael C. Weisenburg.

The reckoning of climate change calls for us to fundamentally rethink our notions of human centrality, superiority and power. Drawing on a wide range of modern writers and thinkers - from Freud and Darwin to Latour and Derrida, from Shakespeare and Carroll to Woolf and Kafka - Radical Animism develops a new theory of life for a planet in crisis. In this original and timely work, Jemma Deer reframes our thinking of the Anthropocene with ideas from anthropology, astronomy, deconstruction, evolutionary biology, psychoanalysis, quantum physics and veganism. Through readings that are both inventive and compelling, this book shows how 'literary animism' - the active and transformative life of literature - can open our thinking to the immense power of the non-human world.

Este libro intenta mostrar la representación textual delas islas Galápagos desde su descubrimiento hasta nuestros días. El argumentoprincipal sugiere que la descripción de este espacio crucial para la modernidad,dada la retórica de los escritores de viajes y ficción, transforma el áreainsular para concebir formas alternativas del proyecto de construcción nacionalen América Latina. Como resultado de las empresas coloniales, excursionescientíficas, crónicas periodísticas o expediciones, la escritura de viaje delas Galápagos condiciona la formación del estado y su imaginario nacional. Estoocurre por el capital simbólico que posee archipiélago y por el deseo de losintelectuales latinoamericanos de pertenecer a un territorio cosmopolita.El espacio insular funciona como un significante vacío donde los viajeros pueden comunicar su propio significado al narrar las experiencias de sus viajes. Este fenómeno crea una división conceptual y política entre la identidad de las islas y la nación ecuatoriana. Dichas ambigüedades narrativas crearon una ruptura que condujo a variaciones fundamentales en la forma en que los habitantes locales y entidades extranjeras interpretan las Galápagos hoy en día, ya que su literatura refleja una tensión particular de cara a las tendencias migratorias en las islas, así como los intereses globales que prevalecen en la apropiación del espacio.This book,written in Spanish, takes a literary and cultural studies model to explain thetextual representation of the Galápagos Islands since their discovery untilpresent day. The main argument suggests that the depiction of this crucialspace for modernity in Western thought, given the rhetoric of travel andfiction writers, transforms the insular area with the intention of conceivingdisparate forms of political displacement. Specifically, these depictions show severalconflicts that arose from the seeking of identity in Ecuador during thenation-building project that took place at the time. As a result of colonial enterprises(scientific excursions, exile, tourism, journalistic pieces, expeditions, etc.), travel writings of the Galápagos condition the formation of the state and itsnational imagery because of the extreme symbolic capital of the archipelago andthe desire of Latin American intellectuals to belong to a cosmopolitanterritory.

In the first book devoted exclusively to the ecopoetics of the twenty-first century, Lynn Keller examines poetry of what she terms the "self-conscious Anthropocene," a period in which there is widespread awareness of the scale and severity of human effects on the planet. Recomposing Ecopoetics analyzes work written since the year 2000 by thirteen North American poets--including Evelyn Reilly, Juliana Spahr, Ed Roberson, and Jena Osman--all of whom push the bounds of literary convention as they seek forms and language adequate to complex environmental problems. Drawing as often on linguistic experimentalism as on traditional literary resources, these poets respond to environments transformed by people and take "nature" to be a far more inclusive and culturally imbricated category than conventional nature poetry does. This interdisciplinary study not only brings cutting-edge work in ecocriticism to bear on a diverse archive of contemporary environmental poetry; it also offers the environmental humanities new ways to understand the cultural and affective dimensions of the Anthropocene.

In Building Natures, Julia Daniel establishes the influence of landscape architecture, city planning, and parks management on American poetry to show how modernists engaged with the green worlds and social playgrounds created by these new professions in the early twentieth century. The modern poets who capture these parks in verse explore the aesthetic principles and often failed democratic ideals embedded in the designers' verdant architectures. The poetry of Carl Sandburg, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore foregrounds the artistry behind our most iconic green spaces. At the same time, it demonstrates how parks framed, rather than ameliorated, civic anxieties about an increasingly diverse population living and working in dense, unhealthy urban centers. Through a combination of ecocriticism, urban studies, and historical geography, Building Natures unveils the neglected urban context for seemingly natural landscapes in several modernist poems, such as Moore's "An Octopus" and Stevens's Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, while contributing to the dismantling of the organic-mechanic divide in modernist studies and ecocriticism.