The calamitous impacts of climate change that are beginning to be felt around the world today expose the inextricability of human and natural histories. Arguing for a more complex account of such calamities, Kate Rigby examines a variety of past disasters, from the Black Death of the Middle Ages to the mega-hurricanes of the twenty-first century, revealing the dynamic interaction of diverse human and nonhuman factors in their causation, unfolding, and aftermath. Focusing on the link between the ways disasters are framed by the stories told about them and how people tend to respond to them in practice, Rigby also shows how works of narrative fiction invite ethical reflection on human relations with one another, with our often unruly earthly environs, and with other species in the face of eco-catastrophe. In its investigation of an array of authors from the Romantic period to the present-including Heinrich von Kleist, Mary Shelley, Theodor Storm, Colin Thiele, and Alexis Wright- Dancing with Disaster demonstrates the importance of the environmental humanities in the development of more creative, compassionate, ecologically oriented, and socially just responses to the perils and possibilities of the Anthropocene.

The definitive history of the modern climate change era, from an award-winning writer who has been at the centre of the fight for more than thirty years In 1979, President Jimmy Carter was presented with the findings of scientists who had been investigating whether human activities might change the climate in harmful ways. "A wait-and-see policy may mean waiting until it is too late," their report said. They were right -- but no one was listening. Four decades later, we are haunted by the consequences of this inattention, and the years of complacency, obfuscation and denialism that followed. Today, the staggering scale and scope of what we have done to the planet is impossible to ignore: the seasons of fire and flood have crossed into plain view. Fire and Flood is a comprehensive, compulsively readable history of climate change from veteran environmental journalist Eugene Linden. Linden retells the story of the modern climate change era decade by decade, tracking the progress of four ticking clocks: first, the reality of climate change itself; second, advances in scientific understanding; third, the spread of public awareness; and fourth, the business and finance response. Like no previous writer, Linden has drawn together the elements of the biggest story in the world, in a book that it is gripping as history, as economic investigation, and as scientific thriller.

The Civilian Conservation Corps was one of the most popular programs of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. Over the nine years of the program, from 1933 to 1942, over two and one-half million unemployed young men found work on conservation projects across Depression-stricken America. "Roosevelt's Tree Army," as the CCC men were sometimes called, planted billions of trees, fought forest fires, did historic preservation work, and constructed recreational facilities in state and national parks. At Work in Penn's Woods offers a rich and compelling portrait of Pennsylvania's CCC program.

In Pennsylvania the CCC had one of its largest and most successful programs. The state recruited the second-highest number of workers and had the second-highest number of work camps in the country. Gifford Pinchot, perhaps the most famed conservationist of the first half of the twentieth century, was governor of the state in 1933, and his state foresters were well prepared to make use of the abundant labor the CCC made available to them. The Pennsylvania CCC men planted over 60 million trees in a state that had been scarred by clear-cut logging, rampant forest fires, and destructive tree diseases. They also worked at creating and upgrading state park recreational facilities; some of the camps did historic preservation work at Gettysburg, Hopewell Village, and Fort Necessity. A dozen camps provided assistance to farmers on soil conservation projects.

Aside from conservation work, the CCC program also played another important role in providing relief assistance to Pennsylvania's families in need. The men were paid $30 a month, but usually $22-25 of that was sent home to their families, who were often on relief and in need of the extra money their sons earned. In their free time the men were given the opportunity to take courses in a variety of academic and vocational subjects to train them for life after the CCC. At Work in Penn's Woods, the first comprehensive study of Pennsylvania's CCC program, combines administrative history with portraits of many of the men who worked in the camps. Speakman draws on archival research in primary sources, including some source collections never used before, and on interviews with former CCC men.

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, Ng g 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."

In this, his third book, Paul Cudenec depicts a humanity dispossessed, a society in which freedom, autonomy, creativity, culture, and the spirit of collective solidarity have been deliberately suffocated by a ruthlessly violent and exploitative elite hiding behind the masks of Authority, Property, Law, Progress and God. But he also identifies an underground current of heresy and resistance which resurfaces at key moments in history and which, he argues, has the primal strength to sweep away the prison walls of our diseased civilization and carry us forward to a future of vitality and renewal.

Bestselling author and environmental activist Bill McKibben recounts the personal and global story of the fight to build and preserve a sustainable planet

Bill McKibben is not a person you'd expect to find handcuffed and behind bars, but that's where he found himself in the summer of 2011 after leading the largest civil disobedience in thirty years, protesting the Keystone XL pipeline in front of the White House.

With the Arctic melting, the Midwest in drought, and Irene scouring the Atlantic, McKibben recognized that action was needed if solutions were to be found. Some of those would come at the local level, where McKibben joins forces with a Vermont beekeeper raising his hives as part of the growing trend toward local food. Other solutions would come from a much larger fight against the fossil-fuel industry as a whole.

"Oil and Honey" is McKibben's account of these two necessary and mutually reinforcing sides of the global climate fight--from the center of the maelstrom and from the growing hive of small-scale local answers. With empathy and passion he makes the case for a renewed commitment on both levels, telling the story of raising one year's honey crop and building a social movement that's still cresting.

This is my most comprehensive and definitive work. In it you will learn:

What the philosophy of global warming is and why it is of great importance.

Why the decision-making process concerning the appropriate human response to global warming requires a consideration of the evolutionary forces which propel the planet.

Why cutting fossil fuel emissions is a futile exercise.

What the human species is and how it relates to the non-human life-forms of the Earth.

Why the human species has a special place in the universe and how this is related to global warming.

What it means to say that your life has a purpose.

Why the evolution of technology and the evolution of spirituality are deeply interconnected.

Why there is an urgent need for the technological regulation of the temperature of the Earth's atmosphere.

The book has 3 parts. Part 1 contains 12 chapters each of which contains a particular theme which is of relevance to the philosophy of global warming. Taken as a whole this part of the book can be thought of as providing a detailed overview of my philosophical worldview. Part 2 is a lengthy dialogue in which I respond to an Objector who poses 86 questions, queries and objections relating to my philosophical worldview. Part 3 contains 37 articles which expand on particular topics relating to the philosophy of global warming. I hope that by the end of the book you will have a clear understanding concerning your, and our, place in the universe and how this relates to global warming.

How are we placed on Earth? What is our relationship to the world around us, and how does our thinking affect the way we relate to the world? We are entrapped, says A. James Wohlpart, by what Martin Heidegger calls "enframing" a worldview that considers all objects as mere resources for our use. Walking in the Land of Many Gods envisions a new way of thinking about the world, one grounded in a moral imagination reconnected to Earth. Insightful readings of three contemporary classics of nature writing - Janisse Ray's Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, Terry Tempest Williams's Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, and Linda Hogan's Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World - are at the heart of Wohlpart's endeavor. Powerful and affecting works like these reveal a pathway to a deeper remembering, one that reconnects us with the primal forces of creation and acknowledges the sacredness of the world. We have forgotten that the world around us is rich and fertile and generative, says Wohlpart. His exploration of these literary works, based on deep anthropology and Native American philosophy, opens a pathway into a new way of thinking called sacred reason. Founded on interdependence and interrelationship, and on care and compassion, sacred reason reminds us that divinity exists around us at all times. We are invited to walk, once again, in a land filled with many gods.

Julian Rose presents a penetrating series of essays calling for urgent action to overcome the perilous state of our planet, at the local as well as global level. He both guides and challenges his readers to share with him a journey through the matrix-maze, and to come out at the other end a more aware and more self-assured human being. Drawing upon his life experiences as a farmer, campaigner, artist and social entrepreneur, Julian brings to our consciousness a way to break through the destructive patterns of our consumer-obsessed society and discover a simpler and more fulfilling way forward. Using essays exploring a wide range of pressing planetary concerns, he calls upon his readers to utilise the largely untapped power of their deeper instincts in coming to the aid of a severely depleted global environment and in striving for the amelioration of mankind's perilous human condition.

Modern environmentalism has come to realize that many of its key concerns—“wilderness� and “nature� among them—are contested territory, viewed differently by different people. Understanding nature requires science and ecology, to be sure, but it also requires a sensitivity to history, culture, and narrative. Thus, understanding nature is a fundamentally hermeneutic task.

A provocative essay that imagines a truly ecological future based on political transformation rather than the superficialities of "sustainability." In this provocative call for a new ecological politics, William Ophuls starts from a radical premise: "sustainability" is impossible. We are on an industrial Titanic, fueled by rapidly depleting stocks of fossil hydrocarbons. Making the deck chairs from recyclable materials and feeding the boilers with biofuels is futile. In the end, the ship is doomed by the laws of thermodynamics and by the implacable biological and geological limits that are already beginning to pinch. Ophuls warns us that we are headed for a postindustrial future that, however technologically sophisticated, will resemble the preindustrial past in many important respects. With Plato's Revenge, Ophuls, author of Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, envisions political and social transformations that will lead to a new natural-law politics based on the realities of ecology, physics, and psychology. In a discussion that ranges widely-from ecology to quantum physics to Jungian psychology to Eastern religion to Western political philosophy-Ophuls argues for an essentially Platonic politics of consciousness dedicated to inner cultivation rather than outward expansion and the pursuit of perpetual growth. We would then achieve a way of life that is materially and institutionally simple but culturally and spiritually rich, one in which humanity flourishes in harmony with nature.

In this collection of essays, Paul Cudenec calls for a new deeper level of resistance to global capitalism - one which is rooted in the collective soul not just of humankind but of the living planet. He leads us along the intertwining environmental and philosophical strands of Antibodies, through the passion of Anarchangels and The Task and on to a cutting analysis of Gladio, a state-terrorist branch of what he calls the "plutofascist" system. Also included, alongside short pieces on Taoism and Jungian psychology, is an interview with the author, in which he explains key aspects of his approach. "Very readable and profoundly thoughtful... Many new insights on the destructive relationship between the greater part of humanity and the planet which tries to sustain them." Peter Marshall, author of Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism and Nature's Web: An Exploration of Ecological Thinking.

Gilbert White's Natural History of Selborne (1789) reveals a world of wonders in nature. Over a period of twenty years White describes in minute detail the behaviour of animals through the changing seasons in the rural Hampshire parish of Selborne. He notes everything from the habits of an eccentric tortoise to the mysteries of bird migration and animal reproduction, with the purpose of inspiring others to observe their own surroundings with the same pleasure and attention. Written as a series of letters, White's book has all the immediacy and freshness of an exchange with friends, yet it is none the less crafted with compelling literary skill. His gossipy correspondence has delighted readers from Charles Darwin to Virginia Woolf, and it has been read as a nostalgic evocation of a pastoral vision, a model for local studies of plants and animals, and a precursor to modern ecology. This new edition includes contemporary illustrations and an introduction setting the work in its eighteenth-century context, as well as an appendix tracking the remarkable range of responses to the work over the last two hundred years.

The environment, and how humans affect it, is more of a concern now than ever. We are constantly told that halting climate change requires raising awareness, changing attitudes, and finally altering behaviors among the general public-and fast. New information, attitudes, and actions, it is conventionally assumed, will necessarily follow one from the other. But this approach ignores much of what is known about attitudes in general and environmental attitudes specifically-there is a huge gap between what we say and what we do.
Solving environmental problems requires a scientific understanding of public attitudes. Like rocks in a swollen river, attitudes often lie beneath the surface-hard to see, and even harder to move or change. In Navigating Environmental Attitudes, Thomas Heberlein helps us read the water and negotiate its hidden obstacles, explaining what attitudes are, how they change and influence behavior. Rather than necessarily trying to change public attitudes, we need to design solutions and policies with them in mind. He illustrates these points by tracing the attitudes of the well-known environmentalist Aldo Leopold, while tying social psychology to real-world behaviors throughout the book.
Bringing together theory and practice, Navigating Environmental Attitudes provides a realistic understanding of why and how attitudes matter when it comes to environmental problems; and how, by balancing natural with social science, we can step back from false assumptions and unproductive, frustrating programs to work toward fostering successful, effective environmental action.
"With lively prose, inviting stories, and solid science, Heberlein pilots us deftly through the previously uncharted waters of environmental attitudes. It's a voyage anyone interested in environmental issues needs to take."
-- Robert B. Cialdini, author of Influence: Science and Practice
"Navigating Environmental Attitudes is a terrific book. Heberlein's authentic voice and the book's organization around stories keeps readers hooked. Wildlife biologists, natural resource managers, conservation biologists - and anyone else trying to solve environmental problems - will learn a lot about attitudes, behaviors, and norms; and the fallacy of the Cognitive Fix."
-- Stephen Russell Carpenter, Stephen Alfred Forbes Professor of Zoology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
"People who have spent their lives dealing with environmental issues from a broad range of perspectives consistently abide by erroneous assumption that all we need to do to solve environmental problems is to educate the public. I consider it to be the most dangerous of all assumptions in environmental management. In Navigating Environmental Attitudes, Tom Heberlein brings together expertise in social and biophysical sciences to do an important kind of 'science education'-educating eminent scientists about the realities of their interactions with the broader public."
--the late Bill Freudenburg, Dehlsen Professor of Environment and Society, University of California, Santa Barbara

World Environmental History, a Berkshire Essential, explores how the biosphere is affected by human interventions such as climate change, deforestation, waste management, water and wind energy, population growth, oil spills, ecological imperialism, and urbanization. An interdisciplinary approach to the field considers biological and physical processes as integral parts of history, with mammals, birds, plants, bacteria, and viruses as "biotic actors" that play important roles. So do geological formations and disruptions, such as deserts, mountains, islands, earthquakes, and tsunamis. The volume's rich content includes articles on the anthroposphere, carrying capacity, ethnobotany, Gaia theory, and the Green Revolution, for instance-all of which define key concepts that shape the environmental studies so crucial to a sustainable future.

The first comprehensive treatment of environmental philosophy, going beyond ethics to address the philosophical concepts that underlie environmental thinking and policy-making today * Encompasses all of environmental philosophy, including conservation biology, restoration ecology, sustainability, environmental justice, and more * Offers the first treatment of decision theory in an environmental philosophy text * Explores the conceptions of nature and ethical presuppositions that underlie contemporary environmental debates, and, moving from theory to practice, shows how decision theory translates to public policy * Addresses both hot-button issues, including population and immigration reform, and such ongoing issues as historical legacies and nations' responsibility and obligation for environmental problems * Anchors philosophical concepts to their practical applications, establishing the priority of the discipline's real-world importance

A compelling expose of the highly problematic scholarship of Bjorn Lomborg, the world's leading global warming skeptic In this major assessment of leading climate-change skeptic Bjorn Lomborg, Howard Friel meticulously deconstructs the Danish statistician's claim that global warming is "no catastrophe" by exposing the systematic misrepresentations and partial accounting that are at the core of climate skepticism. His detailed analysis serves not only as a guide to reading the global warming skeptics, but also as a model for assessing the state of climate science. With attention to the complexities of climate-related phenomena across a range of areas-from Arctic sea ice to the Antarctic ice sheet-The Lomborg Deception also offers readers an enlightening review of some of today's most urgent climate concerns. Friel's book is the first to respond directly to Lomborg's controversial research as published in The Skeptical Environmentalist (2001) and Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming (2007). His close reading of Lomborg's textual claims and supporting footnotes reveals a lengthy list of findings that will rock climate skeptics and their allies in the government and news media, demonstrating that the published peer-reviewed climate science, as assessed mainly by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has had it mostly right-even if somewhat conservatively right-all along. Friel's able defense of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth against Lomborg's repeated attacks is by itself worth an attentive reading.

Peter Xavier Price, who is based at the Sussex Centre for Intellectual History, responds to Neil Paul Cummins' 2010 book, 'Is the Human Species Special?: Why human-induced global warming could be in the interests of life'. He seeks to explore and challenge many of the epistemological suppositions undergirding the central ideas of 'Is the Human Species Special?'. Why, the author speculates, does the application of history play such a minor role in considerations of the supposed uniqueness of humanity? Likewise, can mankind's sense of its own historical nature pave the way towards a better informed and responsible future? Questions such as these, amongst many others, form the basis for this short book, in which humanity's eternal struggle to find inherent meaning in its surrounding world - as well as humanity's place within it - is reconsidered.

Nature was always vital in Thomas Merton's life, from the long hours he spent as a child watching his father paint landscapes in the fresh air, to his final years of solitude in the hermitage at Our Lady of Gethsemani, where he contemplated and wrote about the beauty of his surroundings. Throughout his life, Merton's study of the natural world shaped his spirituality in profound ways, and he was one of the first writers to raise concern about ecological issues that have become critical in recent years. In The Environmental Vision of Thomas Merton, author Monica Weis suggests that Merton's interest in nature, which developed significantly during his years at the Abbey of Gethsemani, laid the foundation for his growing environmental consciousness. Tracing Merton's awareness of the natural world from his childhood to the final years of his life, Weis explores his deepening sense of place and desire for solitude, his love and responsibility for all living things, and his evolving ecological awareness.

This title provides a fresh look at the history of environmentalism in the United States, challenging current thinking and presenting an innovative perspective. This book offers a fresh and innovative account of the history of environmentalism in the United States, challenging the dominant narrative in the field. In the widely-held version of events, the US environmental movement was born with the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962 and was driven by the increased leisure and wealth of an educated middle class. Chad Montrie's account moves the origins of environmentalism much further back in time and attributes the growth of environmental awareness to working people. Autoworkers in Michigan and coal miners in Kentucky in the 1940s, and even antebellum mill girls and farmers, all took direct action to protest industrial waste in rivers, polluted air and the damage that strip mining was doing to the environment. They and countless common people drew on their own unique experiences to acquire a grasp of ecological principles, and act. This account is nothing short of a substantial recasting of the past, giving a more accurate picture of what happened, when and why at the beginnings of the environmental movement.

What is the relationship between humans and their surroundings? In order to understand the nature of this relationship we need to take the evolutionary perspective; we need to see the universe as an evolving entity which for billions of years has been very gradually been bringing forth new arrangements, and we need to appreciate that humans are some of these arrangements. The author claims that we live in an epoch in which a violent clash exists. The interactions between humans and their surroundings typically lead to the belief that humans are radically different from their surroundings. Yet, human knowledge has advanced to the point which has revealed the evolutionary perspective. The belief that humans are radically different from their surroundings violently clashes with the belief that the entire universe is an evolving entity which very gradually brings forth new arrangements. The author explores three interrelated aspects of the relationship between humans and their surroundings. Firstly, he seeks to understand why the violent clash exists: Why do contemporary humans typically consider themselves to be radically different from their surroundings? This exploration entails a consideration of how the human perceptual apparatus works, why human perceptions are inevitably constrained, and how conceptions of their surroundings are formed within humans. Secondly, he considers the likelihood that humans could actually be very similar to their surroundings; this entails an exploration of various phenomena such as mind, consciousness, naturalness, awareness, the senses, perception and 'what-it-is-likeness'. Thirdly, he considers whether the human species has a special place in the evolutionary process. This book takes the reader on quite a journey, covering issues such as the limits of our knowledge concerning evolution, the problem of consciousness, directionality in evolution, the location of pain, the purpose of life, how many senses a typical human has, the nature of perception, environmental science, the phantom limb phenomenon, the cosmic significance of technology, planetary astrobiology, the philosophy of biology, human uniqueness, the question of what it means to be human, the nature of the universe, the question of what a mind is, panwhat-it-is-likeness, global warming, the nature of awareness, and the need for planetary geoengineering.

Most people believe that they know what it means to be 'green'. But do they? This book explores what it means to live a 'green' life for an individual human, and what it means for the human species to be a 'green' species. The conclusion is a provocative one - that at the level of an individual human being 'green' is about the possession of a particular attitude to life and the universe, whilst at the level of the human species being 'green' is about the sustainability of the biosphere. This may sound like an obvious conclusion to reach, but it entails that high levels of human resource use and the development of increasingly complex human technologies are 'green' actions which are necessary for sustainability. So, if you believe that being 'green' is about minimising human impacts/minimising human resource use then prepare to have your beliefs challenged.

Environmental disasters, from wildfires and vanishing species to flooding and drought, have increased dramatically in recent years and debates about the environment are rarely far from the headlines. There is growing awareness that these disasters are connected – indeed, that in the fabric of nature everything is interconnected. However, until the publication of Freya Mathews' The Ecological Self, there had been remarkably few attempts to provide a conceptual foundation for such interconnectedness that brought together philosophy and science.

In this acclaimed book, Mathews skilfully weaves together a thought-provoking metaphysics of the environment. She connects the ideas of the seventeenth-century philosopher Spinoza with twentieth-century systems theory and Einstein’s physics to argue that the atomistic cosmology inherited from Newton gave credence to a picture of the universe as fragmented, rather than as whole. Furthermore, it is such faulty thinking that presents human beings as similarly disconnected and individualistic, with the dire consequence that they regard nature as of purely instrumental rather than intrinsic value. She concludes by arguing for an ethics of ecological interdependence and for a basic egalitarianism among living species.

A compelling and fascinating account of how we must change our thinking about the environment, The Ecological Self is a classic of ecological and environmental thinking.

This Routledge Classics edition includes a substantial new Introduction by the author.

Table of Contents

Introduction to the Routledge Classics Edition

1. Atomism and its Ideological Implications

2. Geometrodynamics: A Monistic Metaphysic

3. System and Substance: Alternative Principles of Individuation

4. Value in Nature and Meaning in Life.

Notes

Bibliography

Index

One of the more frequently lodged, serious, and justifiable complaints about ecocritical work is that it is insufficiently theorized. "Ecocritical Theory" puts such claims decisively to rest by offering readers a comprehensive collection of sophisticated but accessible essays that productively investigate the relationship between European theory and ecocritique. With its international roster of contributors and subjects, it also militates against the parochialism of ecocritics who work within the limited canon of the American West. Bringing together approaches and orientations based on the work of European philosophers and cultural theorists, this volume is designed to open new pathways for ecocritical theory and practice in the twenty-first century.