Toxic Belonging? Identity and Ecology in Southern Africa

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Author :
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1443809268
Total Pages : 275 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (438 download)

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Book Synopsis Toxic Belonging? Identity and Ecology in Southern Africa by : Dan Wylie

Download or read book Toxic Belonging? Identity and Ecology in Southern Africa written by Dan Wylie and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-03-26 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Southern Africa’s literatures brim with references to the natural world, its landscapes and its animals. Both fictional and non-fictional works express ongoing debates, often highly politicised, concerning its various groups’ senses of identity and belonging in relation to the land and its denizens. This often involves a pervasive tension between ‘Western’, settler societies’ conceptions of modernity and indigenous world-views, each complicating the often simplistic binarisms drawn between them. In this selection of papers from the 2006 Literature and Ecology Colloquium, held in Grahamstown, South Africa, the complexities of forging imaginative and pragmatic senses of belonging in Southern Africa are explored from a variety of disciplinary persepectives: philosophical, historical, botanical, and anthropological as well as literary. Their subject-matter ranges widely – from Bushmen testimonies to Berlin missionaries, from prehistoric cave-dwellers to Schopenhauer, from white Batswana to lion-tamers – but find themselves echoing one another in intriguing and illuminating ways. These are highly localised meditations on age-old questions: What does it mean to be human within a natural environment? Why do we appear to be so damaging to the ecology that sustains us? Is our presence inevitably ‘toxic’ to our planetary fellow-travellers? How do we forge an ecologically sound sense of belonging in this post-colonial, post-apartheid, post-modern era? If this collection has a single most prominent question binding it together, it is this: What are the limits and potentialities of human compassion towards the natural world?

Relocations

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Publisher : Juta and Company (Pty) Ltd
ISBN 13 : 1775820793
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (758 download)

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Book Synopsis Relocations by : Imraan Coovadia

Download or read book Relocations written by Imraan Coovadia and published by Juta and Company (Pty) Ltd. This book was released on 2016-06-30 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 2009 and 2012, the Gordon Institute for the Performing and Creative Arts in Cape Town held the Great Texts/Big Questions public lecture series which became a celebrated part of Cape Town’s cultural landscape, demonstrating current intellectual and creative thinking in South Africa. These lectures gave audiences a chance to engage with transformative texts and questions, to hear thought leaders speak on the ideas, the books, the art, and the films that matter to them and to us. Relocations: Reading Culture in South Africa brings together a selection of these lectures by world-renowned artists, writers and thinkers in the form of essays, for the benefit of a wider readership, with a contemporary design which plays with words. The authors range from novelists André Brink and Imraan Coovadia (one of the collection’s editors), to poets Gabeba Baderoon and Rustum Kozain, to artist William Kentridge and social activist Zackie Achmat. The topics are as wide as Don Quixote, Marx and Lincoln, trout fishing, Hamlet, the 19th-century Russian writer Gogol and Nabokov’s novel Lolita. Today’s readers are increasingly interested in finding new ways to understand and live with great texts and the world of ideas. Books like this demonstrate that thinking about these texts does not have to be an inaccessibly academic pursuit.

Handbook of Urban Ecology

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 113688341X
Total Pages : 689 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (368 download)

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Book Synopsis Handbook of Urban Ecology by : Ian Douglas

Download or read book Handbook of Urban Ecology written by Ian Douglas and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-12-21 with total page 689 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The birds, animals, insects, trees and plants encountered by the majority of the world’s people are those that survive in, adapt to, or are introduced to, urban areas. Some of these organisms give great pleasure; others invade, colonise and occupy neglected and hidden areas such as derelict land and sewers. Urban areas have a high biodiversity and nature within cities provides many ecosystem services including cooling the urban area, reducing urban flood risk, filtering pollutants, supplying food, and providing accessible recreation. Yet, protecting urban nature faces competition from other urban land uses. The Handbook of Urban Ecology analyses this biodiversity and complexity and provides the science to guide policy and management to make cities more attractive, more enjoyable, and better for our own health and that of the planet. This Handbook contains 50 interdisciplinary contributions from leading academics and practitioners from across the world to provide an in-depth coverage of the main elements of practical urban ecology. It is divided into six parts, dealing with the philosophies, concepts and history of urban ecology; followed by consideration of the biophysical character of the urban environment and the diverse habitats found within it. It then examines human relationships with urban nature, the health, economic and environmental benefits of urban ecology before discussing the methods used in urban ecology and ways of putting the science into practice. The Handbook offers a state-of the art guide to the science, practice and value of urban ecology. The engaging contributions provide students and practitioners with the wealth of interdisciplinary information needed to manage the biota and green landscapes in urban areas.

The Routledge Handbook of Urban Ecology

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1136883401
Total Pages : 1382 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (368 download)

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Book Synopsis The Routledge Handbook of Urban Ecology by : Ian Douglas

Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Urban Ecology written by Ian Douglas and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-12-21 with total page 1382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The birds, animals, insects, trees and plants encountered by the majority of the world’s people are those that survive in, adapt to, or are introduced to, urban areas. Some of these organisms give great pleasure; others invade, colonise and occupy neglected and hidden areas such as derelict land and sewers. Urban areas have a high biodiversity and nature within cities provides many ecosystem services including cooling the urban area, reducing urban flood risk, filtering pollutants, supplying food, and providing accessible recreation. Yet, protecting urban nature faces competition from other urban land uses. The Handbook of Urban Ecology analyses this biodiversity and complexity and provides the science to guide policy and management to make cities more attractive, more enjoyable, and better for our own health and that of the planet. This Handbook contains 50 interdisciplinary contributions from leading academics and practitioners from across the world to provide an in-depth coverage of the main elements of practical urban ecology. It is divided into six parts, dealing with the philosophies, concepts and history of urban ecology; followed by consideration of the biophysical character of the urban environment and the diverse habitats found within it. It then examines human relationships with urban nature, the health, economic and environmental benefits of urban ecology before discussing the methods used in urban ecology and ways of putting the science into practice. The Handbook offers a state-of the art guide to the science, practice and value of urban ecology. The engaging contributions provide students and practitioners with the wealth of interdisciplinary information needed to manage the biota and green landscapes in urban areas.

The Future of Heritage as Climates Change

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317530136
Total Pages : 306 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (175 download)

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Book Synopsis The Future of Heritage as Climates Change by : David Harvey

Download or read book The Future of Heritage as Climates Change written by David Harvey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-04-24 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Climate change is a critical issue for heritage studies. Sites, objects and ways of life all are coming under threat, requiring alternative management, or requiring specific climate change adaptation. Heritage is key to interpreting the societal significance of climate change; notions (and images) of the past are crucial to our understanding of the present, and are used to prompt actions that help society define and achieve a specific and desired future. Relatively little attention has been paid to the critical intersections between heritage and climate change. The Future of Heritage as Climates Change frames the intellectual context within which heritage and climate change can be examined, presenting cases and sub-fields in which the heritage-climate change nexus is being examined and provides synthetic analyses through five overarching themes: The heritage of change among coastal communities: liminality and the politics of engagement Dwelling materials: processes and possibilities; Environmental heritage: meanings of the past – prospects for the future; Blurring the boundaries of nature and culture: the politics of anticipation; Climate change and heritage practice: adaptation and resilience. The Future of Heritage as Climates Change provides scholars, managers, policy makers and students with a much needed examination of heritage and climate change to help make critical decisions in the next several decades.

Natures of Africa

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Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 1868149145
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (681 download)

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Book Synopsis Natures of Africa by : F. Fiona Moolla

Download or read book Natures of Africa written by F. Fiona Moolla and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2016-06-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the first edited volumes to encompass transdisciplinary approaches to a number of cultural forms, including fiction, non-fiction, oral expression and digital media. Environmental and animal studies are rapidly growing areas of interest across a number of disciplines. Natures of Africa is one of the first edited volumes which encompasses transdisciplinary approaches to a number of cultural forms, including fiction, non-fiction, oral expression and digital media. The volume features new research from East Africa and Zimbabwe, as well as the ecocritical and eco-activist 'powerhouses' of Nigeria and South Africa. The chapters engage one another conceptually and epistemologically without an enforced consensus of approach. In their conversation with dominant ideas about nature and animals, they reveal unexpected insights into forms of cultural expression of local communities in Africa. The analyses explore different apprehensions of the connections between humans, animals and the environment, and suggest alternative ways of addressing the challenges facing the continent. These include the problems of global warming, desertification, floods, animal extinctions and environmental destruction attendant upon fossil fuel extraction. There are few books that show how nature in Africa is represented, celebrated, mourned or commoditised. Natures of Africa weaves together studies of narratives - from folklore, travel writing, novels and popular songs - with the insights of poetry and contemporary reflections of Africa on the worldwide web. The chapters test disciplinary and conceptual boundaries, highlighting the ways in which the environmental concerns of African communities cannot be disentangled from social, cultural and political questions. This volume draws on and will appeal to scholars and teachers of oral tradition and indigenous cultures, literature, religion, sociology and anthropology, environmental and animal studies, as well as media and digital cultures in an African context.

The Plague Years

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Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1000631842
Total Pages : 341 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (6 download)

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Book Synopsis The Plague Years by : Michael Titlestad

Download or read book The Plague Years written by Michael Titlestad and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-08-15 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Plague Years collects scholarly and essayistic reflections on literary, visual, and sonic representations of the COVID-19 and other pandemics. These are placed alongside poetry and short fiction written in the first two years of quarantine or isolation. This range expresses the intellectual and imaginative struggle and ingenuity entailed in coming to terms with the rampant spread of disease and its emotional, cultural, and political consequences. The contributions are from diverse contexts: Africa (from Egypt to South Africa), China, Japan, the US, and Scandinavia. They consider some of the array of contemporary engagements: poems translated from Mandarin about the traumas of the frontline, Chinese calligraphic poetry printed on cartons of PPE, comments on the literary history of representing epidemics and pandemics, political analyses of the post-truth present, and the role of life-writing and gaming in an interrupted world. Given the generative and creative obliquity of many of its parts, this collection shifts how one thinks about the diseased present and the archival pasts on which it draws. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of English Studies in Africa.

Recombinant Ecology - A Hybrid Future?

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Author :
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 3319497979
Total Pages : 85 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (194 download)

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Book Synopsis Recombinant Ecology - A Hybrid Future? by : Ian D. Rotherham

Download or read book Recombinant Ecology - A Hybrid Future? written by Ian D. Rotherham and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-01-18 with total page 85 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a challenging new approach to understanding ecological systems especially in urban and urbanised areas. Synthesising current ideas and approaches the book develops an historic context to ecological fusion and recombinant or hybrid ecosystems. With massive climate change and other environmental fluxes, this volume provides insight into consequences for future ecologies. Invasive and non-native or alien species are spreading, often aggressively around the globe. However, much current thinking in ecology and nature conservation fails to accommodate the consequences of changing environmental conditions and fusion of both species and ecological communities. Whether or not conservationists accept ecological change, factors such as urbanisation and globalisation combine with climate and other changes to trigger new hybrid communities and ecologies. Embedding this approach into current ecological thinking this book presents an overview of ideas set in the exemplar case study area of the British Isles. However, the approaches, ideas and conclusions presented here will find application in ecosystem studies and in nature conservation around the world.

Francophone African Women Documentary Filmmakers

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Publisher : Indiana University Press
ISBN 13 : 0253066557
Total Pages : 225 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (53 download)

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Book Synopsis Francophone African Women Documentary Filmmakers by : Suzanne Crosta

Download or read book Francophone African Women Documentary Filmmakers written by Suzanne Crosta and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2023-09-05 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Francophone African Women Documentary Filmmakers is groundbreaking edited collection which explores the contributions of Francophone African women to the field of documentary filmmaking. Rich in its scope and critical vision it constitutes a timely contribution to cutting-edge scholarly debates on African cinemas. Featuring 10 chapters from prominent film scholars, it explores the distinctive documentary work and contributions of Francophone African women filmmakers since the 1960s. It focuses documentaries by North African and Sub-Saharan women filmmakers, including the pioneering work of Safi Faye in Kaddu Beykat, Rama Thiaw's The Revolution Will Not be Televised, Katy Lena Ndiaye's Le Cercle des noyes and En attendant les hommes, Dalila Ennadre's Fama: Heroism Without Glory and Leila Kitani's Nos lieux interdits. Shunned from costly fictional- 35mm-filmmaking, Francophone African Women Documentary Filmmakers examines how these women engaged and experimented with documentary filmmaking in personal, evocative ways that countered the officially sanctioned, nationalist practice of show and teach/promote.

Dance of Life

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Publisher : Ohio University Press
ISBN 13 : 082144414X
Total Pages : 225 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (214 download)

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Book Synopsis Dance of Life by : Gail Fincham

Download or read book Dance of Life written by Gail Fincham and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-22 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, the work of Zakes Mda—novelist, painter, composer, theater director and filmmaker—has attracted worldwide critical attention. Gail Fincham’s book examines the five novels Mda has written since South Africa’s transition to democracy: Ways of Dying (1995), The Heart of Redness (2000), The Madonna of Excelsior (2002), The Whale Caller (2005), and Cion (2007). Dance of Life explores how refigured identity is rooted in Mda’s strongly painterly imagination that creates changed spaces in memory and culture. Through a combination of magic realism, African orature, and intertextuality with the Western canon, Mda rejects dualistic thinking of the past and the present, the human and the nonhuman, the living and the dead, the rural and the urban. He imbues his fictional characters with the power to orchestrate a reconfigured subjectivity that is simultaneously political, social, and aesthetic.

Different Shades of Green

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Publisher : University of Virginia Press
ISBN 13 : 0813936071
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (139 download)

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Book Synopsis Different Shades of Green by : Byron Caminero-Santangelo

Download or read book Different Shades of Green written by Byron Caminero-Santangelo and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2014-07-16 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Engaging important discussions about social conflict, environmental change, and imperialism in Africa, Different Shades of Green points to legacies of African environmental writing, often neglected as a result of critical perspectives shaped by dominant Western conceptions of nature and environmentalism. Drawing on an interdisciplinary framework employing postcolonial studies, political ecology, environmental history, and writing by African environmental activists, Byron Caminero-Santangelo emphasizes connections within African environmental literature, highlighting how African writers have challenged unjust, ecologically destructive forms of imperial development and resource extraction. Different Shades of Green also brings into dialogue a wide range of African creative writing—including works by Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Bessie Head, Nadine Gordimer, Zakes Mda, Nuruddin Farah, Wangari Maathai, and Ken Saro-Wiwa—in order to explore vexing questions for those involved in the struggle for environmental justice, in the study of political ecology, and in the environmental humanities, urging continued imaginative thinking in effecting a more equitable, sustain¬able future in Africa.

Elgar Encyclopedia of Environmental Sociology

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Publisher : Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1803921048
Total Pages : 581 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (39 download)

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Book Synopsis Elgar Encyclopedia of Environmental Sociology by : Christine Overdevest

Download or read book Elgar Encyclopedia of Environmental Sociology written by Christine Overdevest and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2024-04-12 with total page 581 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Elgar Encyclopedia of Environmental Sociology serves as a repository of insight on the complex interactions, challenges and potential solutions that characterize our shared ecological reality. Presenting innovative thinking on a comprehensive range of topics, expert scholars, researchers, and practitioners illuminate the nuances, complexities and diverse perspectives that define the continually evolving field of environmental sociology.

Towards a Cultural Politics of Climate Change

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1316785378
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (167 download)

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Book Synopsis Towards a Cultural Politics of Climate Change by : Harriet Bulkeley

Download or read book Towards a Cultural Politics of Climate Change written by Harriet Bulkeley and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-15 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Towards a Cultural Politics of Climate Change provides a new perspective on how climate change matters in policy-making, business and everyday life. It argues that the work of low carbon transitions takes place through the creation of devices, the mobilisation of desires, and the articulation of dissent. Using case studies from the US, Australia, and Europe, the book examines the creation and contestation of new forms of cultural politics - of how a climate-changed society is articulated, realized and contested. Through this approach it opens up questions about how, where and by whom climate politics is conducted and the ways in which we might respond differently to this societal challenge. This book provides a key reference point for the emerging academic community working on the cultural politics of climate change, and a means through which to engage this new area of research with the broader social sciences.

Cooking Cultures

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1316674037
Total Pages : 266 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (166 download)

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Book Synopsis Cooking Cultures by : Ishita Banerjee-Dube

Download or read book Cooking Cultures written by Ishita Banerjee-Dube and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-07-01 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers a study of food, cooking and cuisine in different societies and cultures over different periods of time. It highlights the intimate connections of food, identity, gender, power, personhood and national culture, and also the intricate combination of ingredients, ideas, ideologies and imagination that go into the representation of food and cuisine. Tracking such blends in different societies and continents developed from trans-cultural flows of goods and peoples, colonial encounters, adventure and adaptation, and change in attitude and taste, Cooking Cultures makes a novel argument about convergent histories of the globe brought about by food and cooking.

J.M. Coetzee's Austerities

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Publisher : Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN 13 : 1409475816
Total Pages : 286 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (94 download)

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Book Synopsis J.M. Coetzee's Austerities by : Professor Graham Bradshaw

Download or read book J.M. Coetzee's Austerities written by Professor Graham Bradshaw and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-04-28 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Representing a wide range of critical and theoretical perspectives, this volume examines J.M. Coetzee's novels from Dusklands to Diary of a Bad Year. The choice of essays reflects three broad goals: aligning the South African dimension of Coetzee's writing with his "late modernist" aesthetic; exploring the relationship between Coetzee's novels and his essays on linguistics; and paying particular attention to his more recent fictional experiments. These objectives are realized in essays focusing on, among other matters, the function of names and etymology in Coetzee's fiction, the vexed relationship between art and politics in apartheid South Africa, the importance of film in Coetzee's literary sensibility, Coetzee's reworkings of Defoe, the paradoxes inherent in confessional narratives, ethics and the controversial politics of reading Disgrace, intertextuality and the fictional self-consciousness of Slow Man. Through its pronounced emphasis on the novelist's later work, the collection points towards a narrato-political and linguistic reassessment of the Coetzee canon.

Ecological Masculinities

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351763407
Total Pages : 254 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (517 download)

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Book Synopsis Ecological Masculinities by : Martin Hultman

Download or read book Ecological Masculinities written by Martin Hultman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-09-26 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Around the globe, unfettered industrialisation has marched forth in unison with massive social inequities. Making matters worse, anthropogenic pressures on Earth’s living systems are causing alarming rates of thermal expansion, sea-level rise, biodiversity losses in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems and a sixth mass extinction. As various disciplines have shown, rich white men in the Global North are the main (although not the only) perpetrators of this slow violence. This book demonstrates that industrial/breadwinner masculinities have come at terrible costs to the living planet and ecomodern masculinities have failed us as well, men included. This book is dedicated to a third and relationally focused pathway that the authors call ecological masculinities. Here, they explore ways that masculinities can advocate and embody broader, deeper and wider care for the global through to local (‘glocal’) commons. Ecological Masculinities works with the wisdoms of four main streams of influence that have come before us. They are: masculinities politics, deep ecology, ecological feminism and feminist care theory. The authors work with profeminist approaches to the conceptualisations and embodiments of modern Western masculinities. From there, they introduce masculinities that give ADAM-n for Earth, others and self, striving to create a more just and ecologically viable planet for all of life. This book is interdisciplinary. It is intended to reach (but is not restricted to) scholars exploring history, gender studies, material feminism, feminist care theory, ecological feminism, deep ecology, social ecology, environmental humanities, social sustainability, science and technology studies and philosophy.

Wetlands in a Dry Land

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Author :
Publisher : University of Washington Press
ISBN 13 : 0295749040
Total Pages : 284 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (957 download)

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Book Synopsis Wetlands in a Dry Land by : Emily O'Gorman

Download or read book Wetlands in a Dry Land written by Emily O'Gorman and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2021-07-13 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the name of agriculture, urban growth, and disease control, humans have drained, filled, or otherwise destroyed nearly 87 percent of the world’s wetlands over the past three centuries. Unintended consequences include biodiversity loss, poor water quality, and the erosion of cultural sites, and only in the past few decades have wetlands been widely recognized as worth preserving. Emily O’Gorman asks, What has counted as a wetland, for whom, and with what consequences? Using the Murray-Darling Basin—a massive river system in eastern Australia that includes over 30,000 wetland areas—as a case study and drawing on archival research and original interviews, O’Gorman examines how people and animals have shaped wetlands from the late nineteenth century to today. She illuminates deeper dynamics by relating how Aboriginal peoples acted then and now as custodians of the landscape, despite the policies of the Australian government; how the movements of water birds affected farmers; and how mosquitoes have defied efforts to fully understand, let alone control, them. Situating the region’s history within global environmental humanities conversations, O’Gorman argues that we need to understand wetlands as socioecological landscapes in order to create new kinds of relationships with and futures for these places.