We are in the midst of a growing ecological crisis. Developing technologies and cultural interventions are throwing the status of "human" into question. It is against this context that Patricia McCormack delivers her expert justification for the "ahuman". An alternative to "posthuman" thought, the term paves the way for thinking that doesn't dissolve into nihilism and despair, but actively embraces issues like human extinction, vegan abolition, atheist occultism, death studies, a refusal of identity politics, deep ecology, and the apocalypse as an optimistic beginning. In order to suggest vitalistic, perhaps even optimistic, ways to negotiate some of the difficulties in thinking and acting in the world, this book explores five key contemporary themes: * Identity * Spirituality * Art * Death * The apocalypse Collapsing activism, artistic practice and affirmative ethics, while introducing some radical contemporary ideas and addressing specifically modern phenomena like death cults, intersectional identity politics and capitalist enslavement of human and nonhuman organisms to the point of 'zombiedom', The Ahuman Manifesto navigates the ways in which we must compose the human differently, specifically beyond nihilism and post- and trans-humanism and outside human privilege. This is so that we can actively think and live viscerally, with connectivity (actual not virtual), and with passion and grace, toward a new world.

Environmental ethics is a relatively new branch of philosophy, which studies the values and principles involved in combatting environmental problems such as pollution, loss of species and habitats, and climate change. As our environment faces evermore threats from human activities these core issues are becoming increasingly important. In this Very Short Introduction Robin Attfield traces the origins of environmental ethics as a discipline, and considers how it defends the independent value of living creatures, and the need to make decisions informed by the needs and interests of future generations. Exploring the diverse approaches to ethical decisions and judgements, he highlights the importance of making processes of production and consumption sustainable and of addressing human population levels, together with policies for preserving species, sub-species, and their habitats. Along the way Attfield discusses different movements such as Deep Ecology, Social Ecology, the Environmental Justice movement and the Green movement, and also considers the attitudes to the environment of the world's religions, including the approach from the major religions and the contributions of the indigenous religions of Asia, Africa and North America. Analysing the current threat of climate change, and proposals for climate engineering, he demonstrates how responsibility for the environment ultimately lies with us all, from states and corporations to individuals, and emphasises how concerted action is required to manage our environment ethically and sustainably. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

From the 1992 Rio Earth Summit to the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Conference there was a concerted international effort to stop climate change. Yet greenhouse gas emissions increased, atmospheric concentrations grew, and global warming became an observable fact of life. In this book, philosopher Dale Jamieson explains what climate change is, why we have failed to stop it, and why it still matters what we do. Centered in philosophy, the volume also treats the scientific, historical, economic, and political dimensions of climate change. Our failure to prevent or even to respond significantly to climate change, Jamieson argues, reflects the impoverishment of our systems of practical reason, the paralysis of our politics, and the limits of our cognitive and affective capacities. The climate change that is underway is remaking the world in such a way that familiar comforts, places, and ways of life will disappear in years or decades rather than centuries. Climate change also threatens our sense of meaning, since it is difficult to believe that our individual actions matter. The challenges that climate change presents go beyond the resources of common sense morality - it can be hard to view such everyday acts as driving and flying as presenting moral problems. Yet there is much that we can do to slow climate change, to adapt to it and restore a sense of agency while living meaningful lives in a changing world.

Marco Altamirano critiques the modern concept of nature to chart a new trajectory for the philosophy of nature. He reveals the modern origins of the epistemological configuration of nature, where a subject confronts an object in space (and at time t), and wonders about her mode of access to that object. After critiquing the spatial orientation of this concept of nature, Altamirano shows that a new concept of time is necessary to reinstall the subject within its concrete ecology. Altamirano goes on to deploy conceptual resources excavated from Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault and Leroi-Gourhan to show how technology, which bypasses the nature-artifice distinction, is an essential dimension of the philosophy of nature. Ultimately, this book draws the profile of a concept of nature based on time and technology that escapes the nature-artifice distinction that has mired the philosophy of nature for so long.

This is not an environmental book, even though it is concerned with the environment. It is not a book to save the world, even though the world is clearly in trouble. Ultimately, Time's Up! is a book about survival; about ensuring that every individual human has the means to save herself or himself from the global crisis that is unfolding. People know that the climate is changing, that species are being removed from the Earth at a rapidly increasing rate, that entire ecosystems are becoming shadows of their former richness; they know, but they do not understand. The global environmental crisis is closing in on humanity from all directions, yet the crisis barely registers on this culture's list of problems. As we stand, humanity is doomed to a collapse that will leave only a few nomads, and a toxic, barely survivable Earth in its wake. So why is nothing being done beyond changing light bulbs, recycling and buying organic food? It's certainly not for a lack of good reasons. Humans have no motivation stronger than survival, yet the culture that dominates "the culture we call Industrial Civilization" has created a set of priorities that value financial wealth, the possession of superfluous goods and short, cheap thrills, above that most basic need. In short, we are prepared to die in order to live a life that is killing us. Time's Up! is all about changing this. It describes what our actions are doing to the very things on Earth that we depend on for survival, at scales that we rarely contemplate. It arms us with the tools to free us from the culture that has blinded us for centuries, and which will allow us to live lives that will give the Earth, and ourselves, a future. Time's Up! proposes something radical, fundamental and frightening; something longterm, exhilarating and absolutely necessary; something totally uncivilized.

Societal transformations are needed across the globe in light of pressing environmental issues. This need to transform is increasingly acknowledged in policy, planning, academic debate, and media, whether it is to achieve decarbonization, resilience, national development plans, or sustainability objectives. This volume provides the first comprehensive comparison of how sustainability transformations are understood across societies. It contains historical analogies and concrete examples from around the world to show how societal transformations could achieve the Paris Agreement and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals through governance, innovations, lifestyle changes, education and new narratives. It examines how societal actors in different geographical, political and cultural contexts understand the agents and drivers of societal change towards sustainability, using data from the academic literature, international news media, lay people's focus groups across five continents, and international politics. This is a valuable resource for academics and policymakers working in environmental governance and sustainability. This is one of a series of publications associated with the Earth System Governance Project. For more publications, see www.cambridge.org/earth-system-governance.

In The Big Muddy, the first long-term environmental history of the Mississippi, Christopher Morris offers a brilliant tour across five centuries as he illuminates the interaction between people and the landscape, from early hunter-gatherer bands to present-day industrial and post-industrial society. Morris shows that when Hernando de Soto arrived at the lower Mississippi Valley, he found an incredibly vast wetland, forty thousand square miles of some of the richest, wettest land in North America, deposited there by the big muddy river that ran through it. But since then much has changed, for the river and for the surrounding valley. Indeed, by the 1890s, the valley was rapidly drying. Morris shows how centuries of increasingly intensified human meddling-including deforestation, swamp drainage, and levee construction-led to drought, disease, and severe flooding. He outlines the damage done by the introduction of foreign species, such as the Argentine nutria, which escaped into the wild and are now busy eating up Louisiana's wetlands. And he critiques the most monumental change in the lower Mississippi Valley-the reconstruction of the river itself, largely under the direction of the Army Corps of Engineers. Valley residents have been paying the price for these human interventions, most visibly with the disaster that followed Hurricane Katrina. Morris also describes how valley residents have been struggling to reinvigorate the valley environment in recent years-such as with the burgeoning catfish and crawfish industries-so that they may once again live off its natural abundance. Morris concludes that the problem with Katrina is the problem with the Amazon Rainforest, drought and famine in Africa, and fires and mudslides in California-it is the end result of the ill-considered bending of natural environments to human purposes.

In twenty short books, Penguin brings you the classics of the environmental movement. In Hot Money Naomi Klein lays out the evidence that deregulated capitalism is waging war on the climate, and shows that, in order to stop the damage, we must change everything we think about how our world is run. Over the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As life on Earth has become irrevocably altered by humans, visionary thinkers around the world have raised their voices to defend the planet, and affirm our place at the heart of its restoration. Their words have endured through the decades, becoming the classics of a movement. Together, these books show the richness of environmental thought, and point the way to a fairer, saner, greener world.

James Lovelock's bestselling The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth is Fighting Back - and How we can Still Save Humanity is a dire warning against the unchecked growth of civilization. 'Despite all our efforts to retreat sustainably, we may be unable to prevent a global decline into a chaotic world ruled by brutal warlords on a devastated Earth...' For thousands of years, humans have exploited the planet without counting the cost. Now Gaia, the living Earth, is fighting back. As the polar icecaps shrink and the global temperature rises, we approach the point of no return. Sustainable development, Lovelock argues, is no longer possible, and the only open to us may be a 'sustainable retreat'. This is the one book you must read to find out what is happening, how bad it will get - and how we can survive. 'The most important book for decades' Andrew Marr 'The most important book ever to be published on the environmental crisis ... Lovelock will go down in history as the scientist who changed our view of the Earth' John Gray, Independent 'Truly terrifying ... Lovelock's arguments carry more conviction than anyone else's now writing' Peter Forbes, Daily Mail James Lovelock is the author of more than 200 scientific papers and the originator of the Gaia Hypothesis (now Gaia Theory). He has written several books on the subject, including Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, The Ages of Gaia and The Vanishing Face of Gaia as well as an autobiography, Homage to Gaia. In September 2005 Prospect magazine named him as one of the world's top 100 global public intellectuals.

Howard Zahniser (1906-1964), executive secretary of The Wilderness Society and editor of The Living Wilderness from 1945 to 1964, is arguably the person most responsible for drafting and promoting the Wilderness Act in 1964. The act, which created the National Wilderness Preservation System, was the culmination of Zahniser's years of tenacious lobbying and his work with conservationists across the nation. In 1964, fifty-four wilderness areas in thirteen states were part of the system; today the number has grown to 757 areas, protecting more than a hundred million acres in forty-four states and Puerto Rico. Zahniser's passion for wild places and his arguments for their preservation were communicated through radio addresses, magazine articles, speeches, and congressional testimony. An eloquent and often poetic writer, he seized every opportunity to make the case for the value of wilderness to people, communities, and the nation. Despite his unquestioned importance and the power of his prose, the best of Zahniser's wilderness writings have never before been gathered in a single volume. This indispensable collection makes available in one place essays and other writings that played a vital role in persuading Congress and the American people that wilderness in the United States deserved permanent protection.

Based on the idea that nature has a soul and that we can communicate with it, ECOtherapy techniques aim to restore and maintain a harmonious energy balance in ecosystems and other systems. "The Universe Loves a Happy Ending" describes how this revolutionary energetic method of remote healing can be used to increase the vitality of communities, nature reserves, and organizations from a distance. Accessibly written, with numerous color illustrations, this guide offers a clear understanding of the principles of ECOtherapy to everyone. Making innovative connections between science and universal spiritual laws, the book demonstrates that energetic guardians consciously using their intuitive development in working with nature can stimulate an ecosystem's long-term vitality. Using the principles and techniques explained in the book, readers can also energetically charge and give direction to their own lives. As such, "The Universe Loves a Happy Ending" empowers each of us to take an active role in caring for the planet.

Debunking myths behind what is known collectively as the new cosmology-a grand, overlapping set of narratives that claim to bring science and spirituality together-Lisa H. Sideris offers a searing critique of the movement's anthropocentric vision of the world. In Consecrating Science, Sideris argues that instead of cultivating an ethic of respect for nature, the new cosmology encourages human arrogance, uncritical reverence for science, and indifference to nonhuman life. Exploring moral sensibilities rooted in experience of the natural world, Sideris shows how a sense of wonder can foster environmental attitudes that will protect our planet from ecological collapse for years to come.

Although climate change has become the dominant concern of the twenty-first century, global powers refuse to implement the changes necessary to reverse these trends. Instead, they have neoliberalized nature and climate change politics and discourse, and there are indications of a more virulent strain of capital accumulation on the horizon. Adrian Parr calls attention to the problematic socioeconomic conditions of neoliberal capitalism underpinning the world's environmental challenges, and she argues that, until we grasp the implications of neoliberalism's interference in climate change talks and policy, humanity is on track to an irreversible crisis.

Parr not only exposes the global failure to produce equitable political options for environmental regulation, but she also breaks down the dominant political paradigms hindering the discovery of viable alternatives. She highlights the neoliberalization of nature in the development of green technologies, land use, dietary habits, reproductive practices, consumption patterns, design strategies, and media. She dismisses the notion that the free market can solve debilitating environmental degradation and climate change as nothing more than a political ghost emptied of its collective aspirations.

Decrying what she perceives as a failure of the human imagination and an impoverishment of political institutions, Parr ruminates on the nature of change and existence in the absence of a future. The sustainability movement, she contends, must engage more aggressively with the logic and cultural manifestations of consumer economics to take hold of a more transformative politics. If the economically powerful continue to monopolize the meaning of environmental change, she warns, new and more promising collective solutions will fail to take root.

Half of the ancient woodlands present in 1945 have been destroyed, replanted with conifers or cleared for cereal production, roads and building development. The intention of this book is to present evidence of our deep cultural need for trees and woods and to inspire people to take care of them. Trees, and indeed woods, know no distinction between town and country; they are close to everyone. If we are to combat local pollution, make even the slightest impact on global warming, enjoy our surroundings and share them with many other creatures, we need trees: trees here and trees now. If we are to nourish more than our prosaic needs we need their longevity, their beauty, their generosity. Trees stand for nature and culture. We shall stand or fall with them.

Today we urgently need to reevaluate the human place in the world in relation to other animals. This book puts Maurice Merleau-Ponty's philosophy into dialogue with literature, evolutionary biology, and animal studies. In a radical departure from most critical animal studies, it argues for evolutionary continuity between human cultural and linguistic behaviors and the semiotic activities of other animals.
In his late work, Derrida complained of philosophers who denied that animals possessed such faculties, but he never investigated the wealth of scientific studies of actual animal behavior. Most animal studies theorists still fail to do this. Yet more than fifty years ago, Merleau-Ponty carefully examined the philosophical consequences of scientific animal studies, with profound implications for human language and culture. For him, "animality is the logos of the sensible world: an incorporated meaning." Human being is inseparable from animality.
This book differs from other studies of Merleau-Ponty by emphasizing his lifelong attention to science. It shows how his attention to evolutionary biology and ethology anticipated recent studies of animal cognition, culture, and communication.

Our attachment to the tropical rain forest has grown over the past hundred years from a minority colonial pursuit to mainstream environmental obsession. The tropical rain forest has variously been assumed to be the world's most important repository of biological diversity and 'the lungs of the planet'. As Philip Stott shows in this magnificent monograph, neither claim has any basis in fact. The Northern environmentalist conception of the tropical rain forest is far removed from the ecological realities of the places it purports to denote. Most of the 'million year old forest' to which environmentalists sentimentally refer turns out to have existed for less than 20,000 years. During the last ice age the tropics were colder and drier than today and probably more closely resembled the savanna grasslands of East Africa. Most of the abundant plants and insects of the so-called tropical rain forest are equally novel, having co-evolved with the trees. Claims regarding the fragility of the ecosystems in tropical areas are similarly awry. Recent research suggests that a clear-cut area will return to forest with a similar level of biological diversity to the original within twenty years. Ironically, the mythical 'climax rain forest' would be a barren place: no new species would evolve because there would be no new environmental niches to be filled. The myth of the tropical rain forest suits the purposes of Northern environmentalists, who are able to justify demands for restrictions on the conversion of 'virgin forest' to other uses. Yet the history of the world has been one of evolutionary change. If we attempt to maintain stasis, we risk limiting our ability to adapt to change when it inevitably comes. Calls for the tropical rain forest to be preserved are founded on the implied presumption that the people living in tropical regions are merely there to protect a western construct. This denigrates their rights and dehumanises them. If people in developing countries are to escape from the mire of poverty in which so many continue to live, it is essential that they have secure rights of tenure and are free to do with their land what they will. Some may make mistakes, some may fail in their attempts to manage the land, but many will be successful and those successes will be emulated. Through a process of experimentation -- trial, error and emulation -- people will come to learn how best to manage the land. The environment will then be managed in ways that are best for humanity as a whole, not according to the whims of a minority of eco-imperialists. Giving rights to people, not to the environment, is not only best for the people, but is also best for the environment. Philip Stott, Professor of Biogeography at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, provides an eloquent deconstruction of the ideas that have led to the mythical western idea of the tropical rain forest, which has constrained our ability to understand the environments of developing countries and has enabled the eco-imperialist vision to flourish.

Nature Prose seeks to explain the popularity and appeal of contemporary writing about nature. This book intervenes in key areas of contemporary debate about literature and the environment and explores the enduring appeal of writing about nature during an ecological crisis. Using a range of international examples, with a focus on late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century writing from Britain and the US, Dominic Head argues that nature writing contains formal effects which encapsulate our current ecological dilemma and offer a fresh resource for critical thinking. The environmental crisis has injected a fresh urgency into nature writing, along with a new piquancy for those readers seeking solace in the nonhuman, or for those looking to change their habits in the face of ecological catastrophe. However, behind this apparently strong match between the aims of nature writers and the desires of their readers, there is also a shared mood of radical uncertainty and insecurity. The treatment and construction of 'nature' in contemporary imaginative prose reveals some significant paradoxes beneath its dominant moods, moods which are usually earnest, sometimes celebratory, sometimes prophetic or cautionary. It is in these paradoxical moments that the contemporary ecological crisis is formally encoded, in a progressive development of ecological consciousness from the late 1950s onwards. Nature prose, fiction and nonfiction, is now contemporaneous with a defining time of crisis, while also being formally fashioned by that context. This is a mode of writing that emerges in a world in crisis, but which is also, in some ways, in crisis itself. With chapters on remoteness, exclusivity, abundance, and rarity, this book marks a turning point in how literary criticism engages with nature writing.

Environmental aesthetics is an emerging field of study that focuses on nature's aesthetic value as well as on its ethical and environmental implications. Drawing on the research of a number of disciplines, this exciting new area speaks to scholars working in a range of fields, including not only philosophy, but also environmental and cultural studies, public policy and planning, social and political theory, landscape design and management, and art and architecture.

"Nature, Aesthetics, and Environmentalism: From Beauty to Duty" addresses the complex relationships between aesthetic appreciation and environmental issues and emphasizes the valuable contribution that environmental aesthetics can make to environmentalism. Allen Carlson, a pioneer in environmental aesthetics, and Sheila Lintott, who has published widely in aesthetics, combine important historical essays on the appreciation of nature with the best contemporary research in the field. They begin with classic pieces by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, John Muir, John Burroughs, and Aldo Leopold, as well as an essay by Eugene Hargrove that lays out the scientific, artistic, and aesthetic foundations of current environmental beliefs and attitudes. The second section of the book addresses prevailing views on the conceptualization of nature and the various debates on how to properly and respectfully appreciate nature. The third section introduces positive aesthetics, the belief that everything in nature is essentially beautiful, even the devastation caused by earthquakes or floods. The essays in the final section explicitly bring together aesthetics, ethics, and environmentalism to explore the ways in which each might affectthe others.

This book is the first of its kind to examine the role of great powers in the international politics of climate change. It develops a novel analytical framework for studying environmental power in international relations, what counts as a great power in the environmental field, and what their special environmental responsibilities are. In doing so, the book connects International Relations (IR) debates on power inequality, great powers and great power management, with global environmental politics (GEP) scholarship. The book brings together leading scholars in IR and GEP whose contributions focus on major environmental powers (United States, China, European Union, India, Brazil, Russia) and international institutions and issue areas (UN Security Council, multilateral environmental agreements, international climate leadership, coal politics). The contributors to this volume examine how individual great powers have responded to the global climate challenge and whether they have accepted a special responsibility for stabilizing the global climate. They place emerging discourses on great power responsibility in the context of wider debates about international environmental leadership and climate change securitization. And they provide new insights into how international power inequality intersects with the global ecological crisis, and what special role great powers could and should play in the international fight against global warming.

A look at how public relations has dominated public understanding of the natural environment for over one hundred years. In A Strategic Nature, Melissa Aronczyk and Maria I. Espinoza examine public relations as a social and political force that shapes both our understanding of the environmental crises we now face and our responses to them. Drawing on in-depth interviews, ethnography, and archival research, Aronczyk and Espinoza document the evolution of PR techniques to control public perception of the environment since the beginning of the twentieth century. More than spin or misinformation, PR affects how institutions and individuals conceptualize environmental problems - from conservation to coal mining to carbon credits. Revealing the linkages of professional strategists, information politics, and environmental standards, A Strategic Nature shows how public relations restricts alternative paths to a sustainable climate future.

The Great Depression coincided with a wave of natural disasters, including the Dust Bowl and devastating floods of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Recovering from these calamities--and preventing their reoccurrence--was a major goal of the New Deal.
In Nature's New Deal, Neil M. Maher examines the history of one of Franklin D. Roosevelt's boldest and most successful experiments, the Civilian Conservation Corps, describing it as a turning point both in national politics and in the emergence of modern environmentalism. Indeed, Roosevelt addressed both the economic and environmental crises by putting Americans to work at conserving natural resources, through the Soil Conservation Service, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the Civilian Conservation Corps (or CCC). The CCC created public landscapes--natural terrain altered by federal work projects--that helped environmentalism blossom after World War II, Maher notes. Millions of Americans devoted themselves to a new vision of conservation, one that went beyond the old model of simply maximizing the efficient use of natural resources, to include the promotion of human health through outdoor recreation, wilderness preservation, and ecological balance. And yet, as Maher explores the rise and development of the CCC, he also shows how the critique of its campgrounds, picnic areas, hiking trails, and motor roads frames the debate over environmentalism to this day.
From the colorful life at CCC camps, to political discussions in the White House and the philosophical debates dating back to John Muir and Frederick Law Olmsted, Nature's New Deal captures a key moment in the emergence of modern environmentalism.

Do we want to live in a world without birdsong? The pesticides, the coal mines, the clear-felling forestry industry, the industrial farmers are destroying the earth with their insistence on profit. But what point is profit on a dead and silent planet? In this enlightening yet devastating book, Susan Hawthorne writes with clarity and incisiveness on how patriarchy is wreaking destruction on the planet and on communities. The twin mantras of globalisation and growth expounded by the neoliberalism that has hijacked the planet are revealed in all their shabby deception. Backed by meticulous research, the author shows how so-called advances in technology are, like a Trojan horse, used to mask sinister political agendas that sacrifice the common good for the shallow profiteering of corporations and mega-rich individuals. The biotechnologists see the lure of cure, rising share prices and profits. She details how women, lesbians, people with disabilities, Indigenous peoples, the poor, refugees and the very earth itself are being damaged by the crisis of patriarchy that is sucking everyone into its vortex. Importantly, this precise and insightful volume also shows what is needed to get ourselves out of this spiral of destruction: a radical feminist approach with compassion and empathy at its core. Shame is an emotion of the powerless because they cannot change the rules. The book shows a way out of the vortex: it is now up to the collective imagination and action of people everywhere to take up the challenges Susan Hawthorne shows are needed. This is a vital book for a world in crisis and should be read by everyone who cares about our future.

Today, as we confront an unprecedented environmental crisis of our own making, it is more urgent than ever to consider the notion of nature and our place within it. This book brings together essays that individually and as a whole present a detailed and rigorous multidisciplinary exploration of the concept of nature and its wider ethical and political implications. A distinguished list of scholars take up a broad range of questions regarding the relations between the human subject and its natural environment: when and how the concept of nature gave way to the concept of natural resources; the genealogy of the concept of nature through political economy, theology, and modern science; the idea of the Anthropocene; the prospects for green growth; and the deep alienation of human beings in the modern period from both nature and each other. By engaging with a wide range of scholarship, they ultimately converge on a common outlook that is both capacious and original. The essays together present a revaluation of the natural world that seeks to reshape political and ethical ideals and practice with a view to addressing some of the fundamental concerns of our time. Nature and Value features widely known scholars in a broad swath of disciplines, ranging from philosophy, politics, and political economy to geology, law, literature, and psychology. They include Jonathan Schell, David Bromwich, James Tully, Jedediah Purdy, Robert Pollin, Jan Zalasiewicz, Carol Rovane, Sanjay Reddy, Joanna Picciotto, Anthony Laden, Nikolas Kompridis, Bina Gogineni, Kyle Nichols, and the editor, Akeel Bilgrami.