Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-9481528
Nancy G. Barrón, S. Gruber, Gavin Huffman
This article collaboration addresses the importance of contextualizing current climate change discussions in twenty-first-century ecocomposition classrooms. It specifically focuses on the practical significance of what students’ writing and research can accomplish in and outside the classroom, and on how student involvement in the research process can create spaces for new awareness and renewed interest in active engagement with climate change discussions. The article references student projects exhibited at ClimateCon 2020, including one project that focused on Rachel Carson’s ability to persevere despite the many challenges she faced. With ecocomposition as an entry point, the article shows the importance of continued education about the environment and climate change, getting involved with sustainable practices, engaging with environmental awareness campaigns, and, when needed, lobbying for readjusting corporate business practices to include sustainability efforts.
{"title":"Student Engagement and Environmental Awareness","authors":"Nancy G. Barrón, S. Gruber, Gavin Huffman","doi":"10.1215/22011919-9481528","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-9481528","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article collaboration addresses the importance of contextualizing current climate change discussions in twenty-first-century ecocomposition classrooms. It specifically focuses on the practical significance of what students’ writing and research can accomplish in and outside the classroom, and on how student involvement in the research process can create spaces for new awareness and renewed interest in active engagement with climate change discussions. The article references student projects exhibited at ClimateCon 2020, including one project that focused on Rachel Carson’s ability to persevere despite the many challenges she faced. With ecocomposition as an entry point, the article shows the importance of continued education about the environment and climate change, getting involved with sustainable practices, engaging with environmental awareness campaigns, and, when needed, lobbying for readjusting corporate business practices to include sustainability efforts.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44810081","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-9481418
L. Mattson, J. Gordon
Reimagining human-nature relationships in the climate change era conjures mutants, creatures from the deep that help surface modes of becoming for a drenched world of rising tides, plastic oceans, and soaked cities. Re-imaging deep, embodied relations with watery ecologies, then, also involves attention to speculative climate fictions (cli-fi) and the potential worlds they help fathom. Cli-fi renderings of climate disaster provide critical insight into possible alternative arrangements of power, meaning, and ontological status. As such, this article explores the depths of the 1995 cli-fi film Waterworld, offering an ecocritical analysis of how the film’s mutant imaginary might help us fathom how to flourish amid floods and contest the very human forces/forms that shape them. In Waterworld, the authors find queer elemental bodies collaborating with ecology and embracing their inherent impurities. This classic cli-fi film provides an important touchstone for a future in which dominant petro-masculine approaches to pelagic place are found to be drowned, dead ends. This article amplifies how mutant corporeal formations and elemental agencies in Waterworld swirl together to submerge systems of power and privilege and drench binaries. Ultimately, Waterworld’s queer ecology helps morph what and how it means to live in a flooded future as speculative seascapes seep into everyday contemporary climate life.
{"title":"Becoming Mutant","authors":"L. Mattson, J. Gordon","doi":"10.1215/22011919-9481418","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-9481418","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Reimagining human-nature relationships in the climate change era conjures mutants, creatures from the deep that help surface modes of becoming for a drenched world of rising tides, plastic oceans, and soaked cities. Re-imaging deep, embodied relations with watery ecologies, then, also involves attention to speculative climate fictions (cli-fi) and the potential worlds they help fathom. Cli-fi renderings of climate disaster provide critical insight into possible alternative arrangements of power, meaning, and ontological status. As such, this article explores the depths of the 1995 cli-fi film Waterworld, offering an ecocritical analysis of how the film’s mutant imaginary might help us fathom how to flourish amid floods and contest the very human forces/forms that shape them. In Waterworld, the authors find queer elemental bodies collaborating with ecology and embracing their inherent impurities. This classic cli-fi film provides an important touchstone for a future in which dominant petro-masculine approaches to pelagic place are found to be drowned, dead ends. This article amplifies how mutant corporeal formations and elemental agencies in Waterworld swirl together to submerge systems of power and privilege and drench binaries. Ultimately, Waterworld’s queer ecology helps morph what and how it means to live in a flooded future as speculative seascapes seep into everyday contemporary climate life.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43967353","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-9481407
Helen M. Rozwadowski
Futurists have recognized the ocean’s depths as resembling space in its promise as a setting for human success, survival, or redemption. Imagined futures of the ocean have been intertwined with reflections on human evolution and what it means to be human. In 1962 Jacques Cousteau announced Homo aquaticus, a vision involving both technological intervention and natural adaptation to intentionally evolve a species of human to live underwater. The story of Homo aquaticus reveals the extent to which humanity’s future has become tied to the ocean. This article historicizes the casual and common understanding that humans are connected to the sea by investigating the precursors to the Homo aquaticus idea, the attempts to realize this prediction through technology, and the legacies emerging from it. Homo aquaticus and its allied visions, while animated by older traditions, flourished in the historical context of intensely optimistic post–World War II hopes for human exploitation of the ocean, especially its depths. In the face of environmental change and awareness, subsequent versions reflect yearnings merely for survival of the human species. The origin, shape, and fate of the Homo aquaticus idea offer insights into our human relationship with the rapidly changing ocean environment, while its persistence may reflect hope for prospective solutions to encroaching, human-caused disasters.
{"title":"“Bringing Humanity Full Circle Back into the Sea”","authors":"Helen M. Rozwadowski","doi":"10.1215/22011919-9481407","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-9481407","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Futurists have recognized the ocean’s depths as resembling space in its promise as a setting for human success, survival, or redemption. Imagined futures of the ocean have been intertwined with reflections on human evolution and what it means to be human. In 1962 Jacques Cousteau announced Homo aquaticus, a vision involving both technological intervention and natural adaptation to intentionally evolve a species of human to live underwater. The story of Homo aquaticus reveals the extent to which humanity’s future has become tied to the ocean. This article historicizes the casual and common understanding that humans are connected to the sea by investigating the precursors to the Homo aquaticus idea, the attempts to realize this prediction through technology, and the legacies emerging from it. Homo aquaticus and its allied visions, while animated by older traditions, flourished in the historical context of intensely optimistic post–World War II hopes for human exploitation of the ocean, especially its depths. In the face of environmental change and awareness, subsequent versions reflect yearnings merely for survival of the human species. The origin, shape, and fate of the Homo aquaticus idea offer insights into our human relationship with the rapidly changing ocean environment, while its persistence may reflect hope for prospective solutions to encroaching, human-caused disasters.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42007884","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-9481440
J. Guthman
A 2020 report published by the think tank RethinkX predicts the “second domestication of plants and animals, the disruption of the cow, and the collapse of industrial livestock farming” by 2035. Although typical of promissory discourses about the future of food, the report gives unusual emphasis to the gains of efficiency and near limitless growth that will come by eradicating confined livestock and aquaculture operations and replacing them with protein engineered at a molecular level and fermented in bioreactors. While there are many reasons to disrupt industrialized livestock production, lack of efficiency is not one of them. This article examines to what extent this so-called second domestication departs from the radical transformations of animal biologies and living conditions to which it responds. Drawing on canonical texts in agrarian political economy, it parses animal bio-industrialization into sets of practices that accelerate productivity, standardize animal life and infrastructures, and reduce risk to maximize efficiency. It shows these practices at work through recent ethnographic accounts of salmon aquaculture and pork production to illustrate how efforts to override temporalities and contain species in unfamiliar habitats, in the name of efficiency, may be the source of vulnerability in such production systems rather than their strength.
{"title":"The CAFO in the Bioreactor","authors":"J. Guthman","doi":"10.1215/22011919-9481440","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-9481440","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 A 2020 report published by the think tank RethinkX predicts the “second domestication of plants and animals, the disruption of the cow, and the collapse of industrial livestock farming” by 2035. Although typical of promissory discourses about the future of food, the report gives unusual emphasis to the gains of efficiency and near limitless growth that will come by eradicating confined livestock and aquaculture operations and replacing them with protein engineered at a molecular level and fermented in bioreactors. While there are many reasons to disrupt industrialized livestock production, lack of efficiency is not one of them. This article examines to what extent this so-called second domestication departs from the radical transformations of animal biologies and living conditions to which it responds. Drawing on canonical texts in agrarian political economy, it parses animal bio-industrialization into sets of practices that accelerate productivity, standardize animal life and infrastructures, and reduce risk to maximize efficiency. It shows these practices at work through recent ethnographic accounts of salmon aquaculture and pork production to illustrate how efforts to override temporalities and contain species in unfamiliar habitats, in the name of efficiency, may be the source of vulnerability in such production systems rather than their strength.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48571844","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-9481495
M. Duckworth
This article discusses two children’s picture books, The Snail and the Whale (2003), written by Julia Donaldson and illustrated by Axel Scheffler, and The Secret of Black Rock (2017) by Joe Todd-Stanton, as vibrant and fantastic engagements with multispecies worlds. Drawing on new materialism and multispecies studies, the article argues that these two picture books exemplify the possibilities inherent in children’s literature of imaging encounters with multispecies communities and apprehending the dynamic agencies of the material world. With reference to the real marine animals and environments alluded to by the books, it addresses the limitations and opportunities of anthropomorphism, and the significance of the concept of agency in the environmental humanities and children’s literature studies. It argues that the gleeful rhymes of The Snail and the Whale and the awe-inspiring illustrations of The Secret of Black Rock are not mere entertainment but serious and playful explorations of connections between bodies and language, stories and communities, children and adults, human and non-human animals, rocks and fish, and agency and the more-than-human world.
{"title":"Agency and Multispecies Communities in Picture Books","authors":"M. Duckworth","doi":"10.1215/22011919-9481495","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-9481495","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article discusses two children’s picture books, The Snail and the Whale (2003), written by Julia Donaldson and illustrated by Axel Scheffler, and The Secret of Black Rock (2017) by Joe Todd-Stanton, as vibrant and fantastic engagements with multispecies worlds. Drawing on new materialism and multispecies studies, the article argues that these two picture books exemplify the possibilities inherent in children’s literature of imaging encounters with multispecies communities and apprehending the dynamic agencies of the material world. With reference to the real marine animals and environments alluded to by the books, it addresses the limitations and opportunities of anthropomorphism, and the significance of the concept of agency in the environmental humanities and children’s literature studies. It argues that the gleeful rhymes of The Snail and the Whale and the awe-inspiring illustrations of The Secret of Black Rock are not mere entertainment but serious and playful explorations of connections between bodies and language, stories and communities, children and adults, human and non-human animals, rocks and fish, and agency and the more-than-human world.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45928227","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-9481517
Calista Mcrae
This review essay explores three recent academic studies situated at the intersection of Black studies and animal studies: Joshua Bennett’s Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man, Bénédicte Boisseron’s Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question, and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. As these books make clear, wide-ranging possibilities can emerge when one reads Blackness and animals together. Each author finds ways of reexamining the human-animal divide, of calling into question other labels and hierarchies, of seeing subjectivity and vitality and resilience where blankness or death or limit have usually been the standard terms. Their work marks the beginning of what we can expect will be a wave of scholarship offering correctives to past silence and simplifications.
{"title":"“The Great Chain of Being Come Undone”","authors":"Calista Mcrae","doi":"10.1215/22011919-9481517","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-9481517","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This review essay explores three recent academic studies situated at the intersection of Black studies and animal studies: Joshua Bennett’s Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man, Bénédicte Boisseron’s Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question, and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. As these books make clear, wide-ranging possibilities can emerge when one reads Blackness and animals together. Each author finds ways of reexamining the human-animal divide, of calling into question other labels and hierarchies, of seeing subjectivity and vitality and resilience where blankness or death or limit have usually been the standard terms. Their work marks the beginning of what we can expect will be a wave of scholarship offering correctives to past silence and simplifications.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45250242","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-9481506
Malcom Ferdinand
What is the relevance of the concept of wilderness today? For some, the recognition of a troubled history of wilderness regarding people of color does not challenge its pertinence in facing the ecological crisis. However, the author contends that the wilderness concept is problematic because of its inability to recognize other conceptualizations of the Earth held by Indigenous and Black peoples in the Americas and the Caribbean. As a case in point, the author critically engages with a failed attempt to accommodate Black enslaved experiences into a wilderness perspective made by Andreas Malm in a 2018 paper titled “In Wildness Lies the Liberation of the World: On Maroon Ecology and Partisan Nature.” Paradoxically, in suggesting that fugitive slaves’ experiences of “wild” spaces can point to a Marxist theory of wilderness, Malm ignores the concerns of Maroons and Indigenous peoples, including their theorizing voices, their ecology, and their demands for justice. Wilderness is portrayed as emancipatory on the condition that the enslaved and the colonized remain silenced. In response, the author argues that it was not “wilderness” but the ingenious relationships Maroons nurtured with these woods that created the possibility of a world: in marronage lies the search of a world.
{"title":"Behind the Colonial Silence of Wilderness","authors":"Malcom Ferdinand","doi":"10.1215/22011919-9481506","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-9481506","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 What is the relevance of the concept of wilderness today? For some, the recognition of a troubled history of wilderness regarding people of color does not challenge its pertinence in facing the ecological crisis. However, the author contends that the wilderness concept is problematic because of its inability to recognize other conceptualizations of the Earth held by Indigenous and Black peoples in the Americas and the Caribbean. As a case in point, the author critically engages with a failed attempt to accommodate Black enslaved experiences into a wilderness perspective made by Andreas Malm in a 2018 paper titled “In Wildness Lies the Liberation of the World: On Maroon Ecology and Partisan Nature.” Paradoxically, in suggesting that fugitive slaves’ experiences of “wild” spaces can point to a Marxist theory of wilderness, Malm ignores the concerns of Maroons and Indigenous peoples, including their theorizing voices, their ecology, and their demands for justice. Wilderness is portrayed as emancipatory on the condition that the enslaved and the colonized remain silenced. In response, the author argues that it was not “wilderness” but the ingenious relationships Maroons nurtured with these woods that created the possibility of a world: in marronage lies the search of a world.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41410272","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-9481484
Marco Caracciolo
This article focuses on the evocation of children’s experiences in fiction that engages with postapocalyptic scenarios. It examines three contemporary novels from profoundly different geographic contexts—Yoko Tawada’s The Emissary, Niccolò Ammaniti’s Anna, and Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness—that evoke a child’s experience of societal collapse in the wake of a catastrophic event. Diverse meanings come to the fore as these novels outline, through child focalization, the relevance of bodily experience, materiality, and reenchantment vis-à-vis the climate crisis and its uncertainties. This discussion shows how formal choices in climate fiction are instrumental in creating an affective trajectory that complicates adult readers’ perception of our collective future. These close readings stage an encounter between the fields of ecocriticism and childhood studies that speaks to the significance of the figure of the child in the environmental humanities: even in literature by and for adults, the integration of children’s perspectives on the end of the world performs important cultural work by questioning and decentering an understanding of the ecological crisis shaped exclusively by the adult (and adultist) anxieties of parenthood.
{"title":"Child Minds at the End of the World","authors":"Marco Caracciolo","doi":"10.1215/22011919-9481484","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-9481484","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article focuses on the evocation of children’s experiences in fiction that engages with postapocalyptic scenarios. It examines three contemporary novels from profoundly different geographic contexts—Yoko Tawada’s The Emissary, Niccolò Ammaniti’s Anna, and Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness—that evoke a child’s experience of societal collapse in the wake of a catastrophic event. Diverse meanings come to the fore as these novels outline, through child focalization, the relevance of bodily experience, materiality, and reenchantment vis-à-vis the climate crisis and its uncertainties. This discussion shows how formal choices in climate fiction are instrumental in creating an affective trajectory that complicates adult readers’ perception of our collective future. These close readings stage an encounter between the fields of ecocriticism and childhood studies that speaks to the significance of the figure of the child in the environmental humanities: even in literature by and for adults, the integration of children’s perspectives on the end of the world performs important cultural work by questioning and decentering an understanding of the ecological crisis shaped exclusively by the adult (and adultist) anxieties of parenthood.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44557736","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：