This article reconstructs the forgotten friendship between Georges Bataille and the Russian émigré poet and philosopher Boris Poplavsky. Comparing their solar metaphysics, I focus on conceptions of friendship, sacrifice and depersonalisation. First, I retrace Bataille’s relationship to early Surrealis and Russian circles in interwar Paris, with a focus on his friendship with Irina Odoevtseva. I then offer a novel reading of Poplavsky’s poetry through the lens of Bataille’s philosophy, analysing a recurring motif that I call ‘dark solarity’. Uncovering a hidden (...) intertextual dialogue between Poplavsky and Bataille, I argue for Poplavsky’s lasting impact on Bataille’s anti-Icarian sun cult. Finally, my paper demonstrates how Poplavsky’s writings on solar sacrifice, excess and friendship left marks on Bataille’s vision of a solar community, embodied in the secret society Acéphale. The dialogue between Poplavsky and Bataille, I finally suggest, is a missing piece in the entangled history of Russian and French philosophy, as well as an original contribution to discourses on friendship in twentieth-century continental thought. (shrink)

Food systems are influenced by discourses held by individuals and institutions. Market oriented food security and food sovereignty are frequently presented as co-existing discourses in food systems. This paper documents how smallholder farmers embody market food security and food sovereignty discourses in their agricultural practices, and how these discourses prevent new forms of agriculture from developing given socio-political and institutional rigidity. A human ecology systems framework is used to analyse semi-structured interviews with 39 coconut producing smallholder farmers from (...) Leyte, The Philippines. The results document how smallholders perceive market food security discourse as the main way out of food insecure situations, and thus continue to seek institutional support for maintaining a coconut based agricultural system. Farmers also perceive elements of the food sovereignty discourse, notably decision-making agency and agricultural diversification, as parallel strategies to improve their food security. The ongoing support for coconut production and inequitable access to training and knowledge in rural systems traps farmers into an agricultural system influenced by a long history of colonial institutions and social structures. The paper demonstrates that farmers are aware of the interventions required to diversify food systems towards higher value commodities, yet sovereignty is unlikely to be enabled due to maladaptive institutions and the associated access to new training and extension opportunities. The use of human ecology advances food scholarship through embedding a systems analysis into qualitative studies to reveal the influence of food discourses on food systems’ behaviour and outcomes. (shrink)

This paper argues that mainstream economics has never before been more influential, that this threatens the future of humanity, and provides a history and defence of ecological economics and human ecology founded on process philosophy showing how these can and should replace mainstream economics.

This paper is part of the Forum COVID-19: Perspectives in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The history of medicine is mostly written as a history of human medicine. COVID-19 and other zoonotic infectious diseases, however, demand a reconsideration of medical history in terms of ecology and the inclusion of non-human actors and diverse environments. This contribution discusses possible approaches for an ecological history of medicine which satisfies the needs of several current and overlapping (...) crises. (shrink)

A philosophical and narrative memoir, Ecology and Experience is a thoughtful, engaging recounting of author Richard J. Borden’s life entwined in an overview of the intellectual and institutional history of human ecology—a story of life wrapped in a life story. Borden shows that attempts to bridge the mental and environmental arenas are uncertain, but that rigid conventions and narrow views have their dangers too. Human experience and the natural world exist on many levels and gathering (...) from both realms gives rise to novel constellations. In a blend of themes and approaches based on a lifetime of interdisciplinary inquiry, the author wanders these intersections and invites us to exercise our capacities for ecological insight, to deepen the experience of being alive, and, most of all, to more fully enrich our lives. Contents Foreword by Darron Collins, president of the College of the Atlantic Preface Part I. Transects and Plots 1. The Arc of Life 2. Ecology 3. Experience 4. Human Ecology 5. Education Part II. Facets of Life 6. Time and Space 7. Death in Life 8. Personal Ecology 9. Context 10. Metaphor and Meaning Part III. Wider Points of View 11. Kinds of Minds 12. Insight 13. Imagination 14. Keyholes 15. Ecology and Identity 16. The Unfinished Course Part IV. Coda. (shrink)

Western society is steeped in a legacy of white supremacy and colonialism--a worldview that pits humans against nature and that has created numerous pressing social and environmental challenges. So great are these challenges that many of us have come to believe that our species is fundamentally flawed and that our story is destined to be nasty, brutish, and short. In Finding Our Niche I explore these tragedies of western society while offering the makings of an alternative: a set of metaphors (...) and examples that can guide us in reconciling our settler-colonial histories in favor of a new and more sustainable vision for humanity and our natural world. Drawing on a variety of compelling stories from my personal life and research experiences around the world, I bring the reader through the difficult journey of reconciliation, a journey that leads to a more optimistic understanding of human nature and the prospects for our future. Drawing from my fifteen years of experience as an anthropologist and ecologist working with people around the world, I share exceptional stories of local people rejecting the oppressive, industrial logic of progress and creating win-win scenarios, where both people and nature thrive together. These stories include cattle ranching on the Burren in Ireland, clam gardening in coastal British Columbia, and the conservation of an accidental wetland in Northwest Mexico. I structure my telling of these stories with a series of ecological metaphors--including keystone, engineer, and sentinel--that collectively provide a basis for more sustainable ways of living. In tandem with these stories, I weave a series of personal vignettes, drawing from my own struggle to reconcile my identity as a white settler on stolen Indigenous lands. As a whole, the book develops a thesis about how we can reimagine our nature and identity, and in so doing, address issues like climate change, biodiversity loss, and food insecurity by building more healthful and fulfilling relationships with our neighbors and the land- and seascapes around us. Finding our Niche is a timely piece that offers confidence in a time when the realities of ecological disaster are becoming a daily reminder that something has to give. It engages with the critical but thorny problems of sustainability, white supremacy, capitalism, and colonialism in a fresh and productive way, making it a perfect fit for Fernwood's portfolio and critical readership. At once a primer on paradigm shift, it is an accessible and personal book that seeks to offer tangible examples of hope to the countless people who are concerned about the sustainability and future of our societies and planet. (shrink)

From its beginnings, some of German film's most prominent genres and directors have focused on the natural world and its transformations by humans. Heimat films, "city symphonies," mountain films, and rubble films all blend the boundary between landscape documentary and fiction film. Yet German film studies has been slow to adopt an environmental focus, concentrating (understandably) on its subject matter's political implications. This book reveals critical connections between German film, sociopolitical context, and environment, showing it to have been a creative (...) catalyst for the social and ecological transformation of the Anthropocene. The book first considers the interplay between German film and environmental history in films and discourses of Heimat. Weimar-era films such as E. A. Dupont's Die Geierwally (1921), Carl Ludwig Achaz-Duisberg's Sprengbagger 1010 (1929), and Phil Jützi's Hunger in Waldenburg (1929) document and create a forum for discussing environmental change. The book then looks at film as a visual archive of and catalyst for infrastructure development, focusing on Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927), the mountain films of Arnold Fanck, and the Berlin films Stadt der Millionen (Adolf Trotz, 1925), Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grossstadt (Walter Ruttmann, 1927), and Menschen am Sonntag (1930). Nazi-era and postwar films are also examined. By exploring German film history alongside environmental history and theory, this book provides a case study of the power of film within processes of environmental transformation. (shrink)

Martin Empson draws on a Marxist understanding of history to grapple with the contradictory potential of our relationship with our environment. In so doing he shows that human action is key, both to the destruction of nature and to the possibility of a sustainable solution to the ecological crises of the 21st century.

In this essay I argue that the concept of “the body,” ironically generic and a-bodily, is a legacy of the modern political/ecological distinction. I proceed through five sections. First I suggest that the political and the ecological, in spite of a lot of excellent work undermining the nature-culture distinction, remain mutually resistant concepts. In section two I argue that this split can be partially understood through the work of Bruno Latour. For Latour modernity is defined by an attempt to purge (...) culture of nature. This is the “first Great Divide” that constitutes modernity as a concept and in fact a distinct nature-culture. For Latour, this distinction then gets externalized or projected to create a second Great Divide, one imagined by moderns between themselves and other societies. To illustrate the extent of the sway of this distinction, I read a recent and widely influential essay on doing history in the Anthropocene by Dipesh Chakrabarty. Chakrabarty underestimates the role of the nature-culture distinction in the making of climate crisis. Here I also explain that perhaps what is needed is recognition that the human as a morphology both separates itself from ecology and yet—incompatibly—is considered to be an ecological pinnacle. The human isn’t and yet is ecological. Differences among humans, when they are discussed, are attributed unilaterally to the political side of a new political-ecological split. After Latour the nature and culture distinction is questionable, but a political-ecological split survives that attributes the eruptions of discontinuous life entirely to human agency. In the third section I then turn to the work of Frantz Fanon to argue that Latour’s Great Divides are expressed as “Manichaean” in Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. The “ecological” import of Fanon’s concept of Manichaean-ism has largely been missed, thanks both to the salience of the political-ecological distinction and to the subtlety of Fanon’s account. But Fanon is not only talking about politics; he’s talking about ecology. The human, Fanon explains, is meant to be a natural master of the planet, a human among animals. The human is master of all “matter” with which all things related to bodies and all bodies related to things are identified. In the fourth section I suggest that it is this modern Manichaean-ism that produces a crucial double bind in the present: Those who fail to be “the body” of modernism are also those most harmed by its elemental (a word I borrow from a critical reading of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Luce Irigaray for an indistinguishably political and ecological) destruction. Politics, at least in the tradition that gives rise to modern politics, is in fact and has always been the privileging of certain bodies over others. There is no perfectly apolitical bodily feature, though some features of bodies are more politically formative than others. Modernity does nothing to intervene on this. In fact it exacerbates this theme. Neither the discourse of politics nor the discourse of ecology offers refuge to those whose bodies are considered a threat to a human morphology that is planetarily alienated. In the final section of the essay I argue that this partitioning of politics (relations among the humans) from ecology produces “the body” and its generic justice. I return to Latour to argue that he ultimately does not appreciate the double bind discussed in section four. Fanon does. Therefore Fanon offers a better framework for undermining “the political,” not by reducing it to the modern sense of “the ecological,” but by giving attention to what he suggests is the “cortico-visceral” injustice of a modernity that denies its own earthly status. (shrink)

Human behavioral ecology (HBE) began as an attempt to explain human economic, reproductive, and social behavior using neodarwinian theory in concert with theory from ecology and economics, and ethnographic methods. HBE has addressed subsistence decision-making, cooperation, life history trade-offs, parental investment, mate choice, and marriage strategies among hunter-gatherers, herders, peasants, and wage earners in rural and urban settings throughout the world. Despite our rich insights into human behavior, HBE has very rarely been used as (...) a tool to help the people with whom we work. This article introduces a special issue of Human Nature which explores the application of HBE to significant world issues through the design and critique of public policy and international development projects. The articles by Tucker, Shenk, Leonetti et al., and Neil were presented at the 104th annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) in Washington, D.C., in December 2005, in the first organized session of the nascent Evolutionary Anthropology Section (EAS). We conclude this introduction by summarizing some theoretical challenges to applying HBE, and ways in which evolutionary anthropologists can contribute to solving tough world issues. (shrink)

Human concern over the urgency of current environmental issues increasingly entails wide-ranging discussions of how we may rethink the relationship between humans and the rest of the natural world. In order to provide a context for such discussions this anthology provides a selection of some of the most important, interesting and influential readings on the subject from classical times through to the late nineteenth century. Included are such figures as Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, Hildegard of Bingen, St Francis of Assisi, (...) Bacon, Decartes, Kant, Mill, Emerson and Thoreau. As the collection as a whole amply demonstrates, the history of western philosophical accounts of nature can help us to better understand current attitudes and problems. Human Life and the Natural World may also be of interest to a broad range of philosophers and students of philosophy, and more generally to those with a concern for the environment that engages the intellect as well as the heart. (shrink)

This paper argues that human agency is not simply a function of intrinsic properties about the agent, but that agency instead depends on the ecology that the agent is in. In particular, the paper examines ways that disabilities affect agency and shows how, by paying deliberate attention to structuring the social environment around people with disabilities, we can mitigate some of the agential impact of those disabilities. The paper then argues that the impact of one’s social environment on (...) agency isn’t restricted only to those agents that have disabilities, but also characterizes all human agency. All of our agency is environmentally dependent. (shrink)

"Examines ethical, religious, and aesthetic dimensions of the environment from several different disciplines related to the humanities including anthropology, literature, philosophy, religious studies, and history, with examples drawn from Confucianism, aboriginal Australia, Moby-Dick, liberal democracies, Ken Wilber, Joanna Macy, and Gary Snyder"--Provided by publisher.

During the mid-twentieth century, Soviet scientists developed the “natural focus” theory–practice framework to explain outbreaks of diseases endemic to wild animals and transmitted to humans. Focusing on parasitologist-physician Evgeny N. Pavlovsky and other field scientists’ work in the Soviet borderlands, this article explores how the natural focus framework’s concepts and practices were entangled in political as well as material ecologies of knowledge and practice. We argue that the very definition of endemic plague incorporated both hands-on materialist experience and ideological concepts (...) that supported Soviet colonization. Theorizing and fighting plague assisted with the goals of controlling and improving landscapes and peoples in southern Russia and Central Asia. The history of the natural focus framework illustrates how Soviet disease ecology co-developed with the needs of local and central political powers in the Soviet borderlands. (shrink)

After presenting a brief history of the idea of a human right to an adequate environment as it has evolved in the United Nations documents, I assess this approach to our moral responsibility with regard to the environment. I argue that although this rights approach has some substantial weaknesses, these are outweighed by such clear advantages as its action-guiding nature and its political potency.

This essay charts a conceptual history of “planetary health,” which holds that population health and the continuity of human civilization depend on the integrity—the health—of the Earth’s life-support systems. It seeks to identify settler colonial and imperial genealogies of this distinctly ecological approach to human population health and flourishing, an assemblage of systems theory and planetary thinking as well as developments in environmental sciences and theories of sustainable development. Planetary health may be seen as a “third wave” (...) of disease ecology, an emergent resource for more complex, naturalistic, and scaled-up modeling in epidemiology—the latest installment in the search for multifactorial, relational, and integrated explanations of patterns of disease. The approach required a new planetary imaginary—emerging from a series of Earth-encompassing crises, such as global heating—which enlarged and systematized ecological configurations of human health and illness. In tracing and critically situating this conceptual history, the authors offer a partial perspective on what may yet become planetary health, drawing attention to some other conceptual routes that may be taken. (shrink)

In _Vibrant Matter_ the political theorist Jane Bennett, renowned for her work on nature, ethics, and affect, shifts her focus from the human experience of things to things themselves. Bennett argues that political theory needs to do a better job of recognizing the active participation of nonhuman forces in events. Toward that end, she theorizes a “vital materiality” that runs through and across bodies, both human and nonhuman. Bennett explores how political analyses of public events might change were (...) we to acknowledge that agency always emerges as the_ _effect of ad hoc configurations of human and nonhuman forces. She suggests that recognizing that agency is distributed this way, and is not solely the province of humans, might spur the cultivation of a more responsible, ecologically sound politics: a politics less devoted to blaming and condemning individuals than to discerning the web of forces affecting situations and events. Bennett examines the political and theoretical implications of vital materialism through extended discussions of commonplace things and physical phenomena including stem cells, fish oils, electricity, metal, and trash. She reflects on the vital power of material formations such as landfills, which generate lively streams of chemicals, and omega-3 fatty acids, which can transform brain chemistry and mood. Along the way, she engages with the concepts and claims of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Darwin, Adorno, and Deleuze, disclosing a long history of thinking about vibrant matter in Western philosophy, including attempts by Kant, Bergson, and the embryologist Hans Driesch to name the “vital force” inherent in material forms. Bennett concludes by sketching the contours of a “green materialist” ecophilosophy. (shrink)

I argue here that the centeredness of human experience as human is misrepresented by ecocentrists as identical with (or the cause of) human chauvinism, and that although centeredness describes an ineradicable feature of human consciousness, nothing necessarily follows from it other than what follows from any unique configuration of capacities and limitations. Appealing to the ways in which we use anthropomorphizing language, I argue that at the root of this misrepresentation is a failure to take seriously (...) not only the perceptual and epistemic centeredness of human experience, but the ways in which gendered and heterosexualized social norms have become naturalized among its features. Restoring human-centeredness to environmental conscience requires becoming clear about how centeredness is realized not only as chauvinism, but as heterosexism—not because any necessity governs this history, but because what makes enduring change possible is the development of an environmental conscience equally committed to the struggle for social justice. (shrink)

In the 1970s, deep ecologists developed a radical normative argument for ‘ecological consciousness’ to challenge environmental and human exploita- tion. Such consciousness would replace the Enlightenment dualist ‘illusion’ with a post-Enlightenment holism that ‘fully integrated’ humanity within the ecosphere. By the 2000s, deep ecology had fallen out of favour with many green scholars. And, in 2014, it was described as a ‘spent force’. However, this decline has coincided with calls by influential advocates of ‘corporate social and environmental responsibility’ (...) (CSER) and ‘green growth’ (GG) that urge market actors to ensure voluntarily that social and environmental ‘problems are addressed holistically’. Given that CSER and GG have also been associ- ated with rent seeking, privatisation and reducing incomes of the poor, could it be that some of deep ecology’s once radical ideas today serve to legitimate forms of exploitation that they once decried? A critical realist perspective can problematise deep ecology’s highly normative response to exploitation and alienation. By settling ontological questions in favour of holism and promoting moral voluntarism, deep ecology failed to address how actors with different interests might adopt green ideas. This blind spot can be cured by focusing instead on the active deployment of ethics, morality, values, beliefs, ideas and knowledges by political actors in historically specific contexts. Both critical normative and critical realist modes of engaging with environmental values are important; however, at a time when holism and voluntarism are gaining influence, critical realism offers helpful insight into the uses and abuses of such values. (shrink)

The transfer of food among group members is a ubiquitous feature of small-scale forager and forager-agricultural populations. The uniqueness of pervasive sharing among humans, especially among unrelated individuals, has led researchers to evaluate numerous hypotheses about the adaptive functions and patterns of sharing in different ecologies. This article attempts to organize available cross-cultural evidence pertaining to several contentious evolutionary models: kin selection, reciprocal altruism, tolerated scrounging, and costly signaling. Debates about the relevance of these models focus primarily on the extent (...) to which individuals exert control over the distribution of foods they acquire, and the extent to which donors receive food or other fitness-enhancing benefits in return for shares given away. Each model can explain some of the variance in sharing patterns within groups, and so generalizations that ignore or deny the importance of any one model may be misleading. Careful multivariate analyses and cross-cultural comparisons of food transfer patterns are therefore necessary tools for assessing aspects of the sexual division of labor, human life history evolution, and the evolution of the family. This article also introduces a framework for better understanding variation in sharing behavior across small-scale traditional societies. I discuss the importance of resource ecology and the degree of coordination in acquisition activities as a key feature that influences sharing behavior. (shrink)

Greening the Past argues that 'western civilization' is rapidly approaching a crisis unique in world history, and that a new world-view now emerging is best encapsulated by a Green, anarchist-ecological analysis. The approach outlined in this book embraces general systems theory and recent discoveries in physics as well as key philosophical issues such as the nature of time, objectivity and causality, and an eco-psychological view of human nature. It includes new interpretations of the place of myth and language (...) in historical writing and urges a re-evaluation of the dialectical method. (shrink)

In this special issue of Human Nature we explore the possible adaptive links between teaching and learning during childhood, and we aim to expand the dialogue on the ways in which the social sciences, and in particular current anthropological research, may better inform our shifting understanding of how these processes vary in different social and ecological environments. Despite the cross-disciplinary trend toward incorporating more behavioral and cognitive data outside of postindustrial state societies, much of the published cross-cultural data is (...) presented as stand-alone population-level studies, making it challenging to extrapolate trends or incorporate both ecological and developmental perspectives. Here, contributors explore how human life history, ecological experience, cumulative culture, and ethnolinguistics impact social learning and child development in foraging and transitioning societies around the world. Using historical ethnographic data and qualitative and quantitative data from studies with contemporary populations, authors interrogate the array of factors that likely interact with cognitive development and learning. They provide contributions that explore the unique environmental, social, and cultural conditions that characterize such populations, offering key insights into processes of social learning, adaptive learning responses, and culture change. This series of articles demonstrates that children are taught culturally and environmentally salient skills in myriad ways, ranging from institutionalized instruction to brief, nuanced, and indirect instruction. Our hope is that this collection stimulates more research on the evolutionary and developmental implications associated with teaching and learning among humans. (shrink)

The Anthropocene denotes the impact of human activity on Earth systems, resulting in mass extinctions of plant and animal species, pollution of oceans, lakes and rivers, and altering of the atmosphere. The Anthropocene signifies the mass control of nature by humans, the erasure of boundaries between humanity and nature, and the threat to human existence by human-made technology. How can biological humans flourish, if their physical environment, the very condition of their existence, is destroyed? What does it (...) mean to thrive as a human in an age when human-made machines threaten to make humanity obsolete? How does human flourishing relate to human history? This essay argues that the monotheistic traditions, and Judaism in particular, offer meaningful religious imaginaries for the Anthropocene because they envision human flourishing as embodied, ecological and historically grounded. In contrast to secular imaginaries, which either declare the “end of nature” or envision the obsolescence of biological humanity, the Judaic religious imaginary honors the interconnectedness and interdependence of all creatures, while recognizing human responsibility toward the well-being of the natural world. Viewing nature as divinely created, and, thus “enchanted” by the divine presence, the Judaic religious imaginary offers a vision of human flourishing based on the ethics of care and responsibility that enables humanity to respond and perhaps even prevent further ecological collapse. (shrink)

Postmodernism was not launched by the development of Warholesque pop art in the 1960s, nor was it initiated by the explosive destruction of the Pruitt-Igoe modern housing project of St Louis, Missouri in 1972, or by the commissioning of Jean-Francois Lyotard's work on knowledge in advanced societies by the Quebec government in the late 1970s. Postmodernism began with the publication of a paper entitled `The individualistic concept of plant the association' in 1926 by the plant ecologist Henry Gleason. If we (...) dare to characterize postmodernism, emphases on ideas such as heterogeneity, ephemerality, anti-foundationalism, pluralism, fragmentation, indeterminacy, schizophrenia, chaos, antiformalism, discontinuity, absence, playfulness, irony, localism, anarchy and ontological meaninglessness are the ones that tend to abound. The Gleasonian theory of plant associations can be said to reflect such ideas in the ecological arena. Certainly there is room for, and an expanding professional commitment to, a fully-fledged neo-Gleasonian postmodern approach to natural history in which ecological phenomena are examined using non-determinist, pluralist and local perspectives that reject the foundationalism and unifying approach of modernist science and which posits a view of the Earth's biota highlighting fragmentation, anarchism and non-interaction. Community ecology, as opposed to the unifying and totalizing tendencies of ecosystems ecology, might rightly claim to be the intellectual site of such a postmodern natural history. Often, postmodern studies not only attempt to describe a postmodern phenomenon but act to forge new varieties of postmodernism. It is in this vein that this paper seeks to present a non-anthropocentric form of postmodernism; not by dissolving the dualistic barrier that separates humanity from nature (as many environmentalisms would advocate) but by dissolving humanity and nature. (shrink)

Calling post-modernism merely "the last tortured gasps of the old paradigm, not the birth-cries of the new," Martin (affiliations, academic or otherwise, not noted) seeks to move along to a "post-Western" perspective on history. He writes from a Green viewpoint (anarchist, feminist, and ecological), giving much credit to American anarchist Murray Bookchin, who he calls the last great Western philosopher. Double-spaced. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR.

How has the concept of wild nature changed over the millennia? And what have been the environmental consequences? In this broad-ranging book Max Oelschlaeger argues that the idea of wilderness has reflected the evolving character of human existence from Paleolithic times to the present day. An intellectual history, it draws together evidence from philosophy, anthropology, theology, literature, ecology, cultural geography, and archaeology to provide a new scientifically and philosophically informed understanding of humankind's relationship to nature. Oelschlaeger begins (...) by examining the culture of prehistoric hunter-gatherers, whose totems symbolized the idea of organic unity between humankind and wild nature, and idea that the author believes is essential to any attempt to define human potential. He next traces how the transformation of these hunter-gatherers into farmers led to a new awareness of distinctions between humankind and nature, and how Hellenism and Judeo-Christianity later introduced the unprecedented concept that nature was valueless until humanized. Oelschlaeger discusses the concept of wilderness in relation to the rise of classical science and modernism, and shows that opposition to "modernism" arose almost immediately from scientific, literary, and philosophical communities. He provides new and, in some cases, revisionist studies of the seminal American figures Thoreau, Muir, and Leopold, and he gives fresh readings of America's two prodigious wilderness poets Robinson Jeffers and Gary Snyder. He concludes with a searching look at the relationship of evolutionary thought to our postmodern effort to reconceptualize ourselves as civilized beings who remain, in some ways, natural animals. (shrink)

This article explores histories of the science of stress and its measurement from the mid 19th century, and brings these into dialogue with critical sociological analysis of emerging responses to work stress in policy and practice. In particular, it shows how the contemporary development of biomedical and consumer devices for stress self-monitoring is based on selectively rediscovering the biological determinants and biomarkers of stress, human functioning in terms of evolutionary ecology, and the physical health impacts of stress. It (...) considers how the placement of the individual body and its environment within particular spatio-temporal configurations renders it subject to experimental investigation through standardized apparatus, electricity, and statistical normalization. Examining key themes and processes such as homeostasis, metricization, datafication, and emotional governance, we conclude that the figure of the ‘body electric’ plays a central limiting role in current technology-supported approaches to managing work stress, and that an historical account can usefully open these to collective scrutiny. (shrink)

The threat of ecological collapse is increasingly becoming a reality for the world’s populations, both human and nonhuman; addressing this global challenge requires enormous cultural creativity and demands a diversity of perspectives, especially from the humanities. Theology and Ecology Across the Disciplines draws from a variety of academic disciplines and positions in order to explore the role and nature of environmental responsibility, especially where such themes intersect with religious or theological viewpoints. Covering disciplines such as history, philosophy, (...) literature, politics, peace studies, economics, women’s studies, and the ecological sciences as well as systematic and moral theology, the contributors emphasize how these positions have begun to develop distinct perspectives on urgent ecological issues, as well as pointing toward specific practices at the local and international level. This volume provides a multidisciplinary point of departure for urgent conversations on environmental responsibility that resist simplistic solutions. Rather, the contributors highlight the complex nature of modern ecology, and suggest creative ways forward in the situation of an apparently intractable global problem. (shrink)

Decision makers addressing the ecological crisis face the challenge of considering complex ecosystems in their socioeconomic decisions. Complementary to ecological sciences, other scientific frameworks, grouped under the umbrella term environmental sciences, offer decision makers the opportunity to pursue sustainable paths. Because the environmental sciences are drawn from different branches of science, environmental ethics must go beyond the legacy of ecology and the life sciences to describe the contribution of scientific knowledge to addressing the ecological crisis. In this regard, I (...) analyze and compare three environmental sciences based on their seminal articles: Conservation Biology, Sustainability Science, and Sustainability Economics. My analysis shows that conservation biology and sustainability economics share strong similarities despite their different disciplinary backgrounds (life _versus_ social sciences). Both seek to contrast a biocentric and an anthropocentric perspective. The goal of sustainability is therefore understood as a balance that must be found between these two perspectives. If the issue of balancing human and non-human interests is still relevant to sustainable science, it is more likely to take place in an ecocentric perspective based on alternative ontological and normative prescriptions. Based on this analysis, I distinguish between ‘proscriptive value-based’ scientific work that cannot be used for policy advice but is flexible to different value systems, and ‘prescriptive value-based’ scientific work that can be used for policy advice but is fixed within a given value system. Conflicting recommendations from environmental scientists therefore result from the coexistence of multiple ‘prescriptive value-based’ scientific approaches based on different conceptions of the relationship between humans and nature. (shrink)

For most of the twentieth century, nature conservation activities were connected to the protection of agrarian landscapes. During the late 1980s, the introduction of the concept of ‘new wilderness’ offered new opportunities for ecologists, but at the same time produced conflicts with traditional nature and landscape conservation. At the heart of the conflict were different visions of the relation between nature and society, sometimes resulting in a polarised debate, with opposing Arcadian and wilderness visions. In this paper, the new wilderness (...) will be described from a landscape perspective, envisioning these wildernesses as a phase in the long history of human influences on landscapes and as part of a landscape that is complex and multi-layered. Some examples will show how a sectoral approach to nature leads to projects in which opportunities to integrate the new wilderness into a wider context of landscape and society are missed. In the final part, a prospect will be shown in which (new) wilderness is seen as part of a layered landscape. (shrink)

I argue that Sartre’s philosophy can be both broadened in its aspirations and deepened in its implications through dialogue with the life sciences. Section 1 introduces the philosophical terrain. Section 2 explores Sartre’s evolving understanding of nature and human relations with nature. Section 3 explores Sartre’s perspectives on scientific inquiry, natural history, and dialectical reason. Section 4 outlines recent developments in the life sciences that bear directly on Sartre’s quiet curiosity about a naturalistic dialectics. Section 5 suggests how (...) these developments constitute progress toward an “ecologized” dialectical philosophy consistent with Sartre’s mature ontology of praxis and pertinent to addressing the burgeoning socioecological crisis. (shrink)

In this photo essay, we take readers through ecologies of de/colonization that we engage with in our creative methodology of walking and talking. As academics called upon to do equity, diversity and decolonization work in colonial institutions, we reflect on our location in lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ lands (“Victoria, BC, Canada”) and the circuits that extend to the Caribbean archipelago of our origins and families (Borikén/Puerto Rico and Jamaica). We take up the tasks of collectively reflecting on how to care for (...) our communities and for each other in an interconnected world amidst socio-ecological crisis. Our method that emerged during the pandemic is specific to our embodiments “here” as settlers of Caribbean roots whose family histories “there” include both complicity with and domination by colonization, trans-Atlantic enslavement, and forced migration. We are attempting to learn, as we hold the messiness of institutions who want straightforward paths to remediate racism, colonization, and the like. Our walking and talking follow a meandering and re-visiting process prompted by our institutional contexts and circumstances, and also by serendipity, surprise and beauty offered through non-human elements on our walks. The photos evidence these moments and the connections to “here-there” in ecologies of de/colonization. We invite readers on our circuitous paths that involve deconstructing, and building or affirming, noticing, following literal paths and those in scholarly-activist circles. In the creative process of drawing relations of the here-there, and attending to serendipity, ancestral spirit, and more-than-human agency, we witness and imagine worlds otherwise (King et al., 2020). These circuitous roots and routes offer possibilities of reckoning, repairing and re-worlding. (shrink)

‘‘COGNITIVE ECOLOGY’’ is a fruitful model for Shakespearian studies, early modern literary and cultural history, and theatrical history more widely. Cognitive ecologies are the multidimensional contexts in which we remember, feel, think, sense, communicate, imagine, and act, often collaboratively, on the fly, and in rich ongoing interaction with our environments. Along with the anthropologist Edwin Hutchins,1 we use the term ‘‘cognitive ecology’’ to integrate a number of recent approaches to cultural cognition: we believe these approaches offer (...) productive lines of engagement with early modern literary and historical studies.2 The framework arises out of our work in extended mind and distributed cognition.3 The extended mind hypothesis arose from a post-connectionist philosophy of cognitive science. This approach was articulated in Andy Clark’s Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again, and further developed by Susan Hurley and Mark Rowlands, among others.4 The distributed cognition approach arose independently, from work in cognitive anthropology, HCI (Human-Computer Interaction), the sociology of education and work, and science studies. The principles of distributed cognition were articulated in Hutchins’s ethnography of navigation, Cogni- tion in the Wild,5 and developed by theorists such as David Kirsh and Lucy Suchman.6 These models share an anti-individualist approach to cognition. In all these views, mental activities spread or smear across the boundaries of skull and skin to include parts of the social and material world. In remembering, decision making, and acting, whether individually or in small groups, our complex and structured activities involve many distinctive dimensions: neural, affective, kines-. (shrink)

In addition to foregrounding the intimate interconnectedness between the human and the non-human world necro-ecology also undermines the absolute separation between life and death. The purpose of this paper is to deploy these central tenets of necro-ecology to provide a reading of Karoline von Günderrode’s 1805 “The Idea of the Earth.” After discussing a shift that takes place in Schelling’s theory of the relationship between nature, life, and death (Section 1) I turn to the role of (...) corporeal decomposition in relation to the earth as spelled out by Günderrode in “The Idea of the Earth” (Section 2). Though “The Idea of the Earth” operates within a naturphilosophical framework, it does so in a way distinct from Schelling’s theologically inflected middle work and in a way that is of relevance to the philosophical history and promise of necro-ecology. (shrink)

This article intervenes in recent formalist and ecocritical debates, drawing on the philosophy of Charles Darwin and Édouard Glissant to develop an ecopoetic theory of relational form. Gathering perspectives from ecocriticism and new materialism, literary criticism and comparative literature, the history and philosophy of science, postcolonial theory, critical race theory, and Black studies, it reads form as an interdisciplinary object that is part of the world, rather than an imposed feature of human language or perception. In this way, (...) it produces a relational theory of form that is not hylomorphic or defined through the relation between form and content but, rather, is defined by the relation between a content and extant and, so, an interaction of relation and repetition. Drawing on the history of ecological science, it further explores how forms combine, how they amplify and interfere with each other, and how they support relations of harm and care. Finally, it uses this ecopoetic theory of form to read the histories of racial violence and migration in Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (1867) and Helen Oyeyemi’s White Is for Witching (2009). (shrink)

A new paradigm in theology, termed evolutionary theology, supports the understanding of ecology as the proper ordering of the relations between living organisms and their environment. It is argued that evolutionary theology yields a unique conceptual framework in which the human species share a common history with the entire Universe and respecting nature’s integrity means securing a common destiny to everything that exists. This is a powerful motivation for adopting a balanced ecological attitude aimed at respecting nature’s (...) inherent integrity. Furthermore, proposing theological arguments to substantiate ecological claims will help neutralize the objections that religion as such promotes anti-ecological attitudes. Such objections become more pressing when religion focuses exclusively on the afterlife in the immaterial and eternal world to come, and neglects the well-being of the material and temporal Universe. -------------- Received: 30/08/2020. Reviewed: 07/10/2020. Accepted: 12/11/2020. (shrink)

An environmental history of Buddhism. The book addresses the basic concerns of environmental history: the history of human thought about "nature" or "the environment"; the influence of environmental factors on human history; and the effect of human-caused environmental changes on human society.

Human linguistic phenomenon is at one and the same time an individual, social, and political fact. As such, its study should bear in mind these complex interrelations, which are produced inside the framework of the sociocultural and historical ecosystem of each human community. Understanding this phenomenon is often no easy task, due to the range of elements involved and their interrelations. The absence of valid, clearly developed paradigms adds to the problem and means that the theoretical conclusions that (...) emerge may be unclear on certain points. It is true that in the last fifty years sociolinguistic studies have advanced considerably, and today we have access to an impressive set of data and a wide variety of theoretical reflections. But as a discipline sociolinguistics does not yet have unified, powerful theoretical models able to account rigorously and clearly for the phenomena it studies. Sociolinguistic studies are today a diverse set of contributions in which certain and theoretical schools and lines of research emerged; but as is to be expected in a relatively new field, there is not enough communication between the various schools and they cannot yet be said to be integrated in terms of their conceptual and theoretical postulates. Against this background, our work aims to contribute to the overall, integrated understanding of the processes of language contact. Via an interdisciplinary, eclectic approach, it also aims to aid the theoretical grounding and integration of a unified, common sociolinguistic paradigm. Our strategy will not be merely to combine the contributions from ongoing research lines, but to address the question from a more global viewpoint which, together with the more innovative contemporary scientific disciplines, permits a harmonious integration of the various sociolinguistic perspectives in a broad, deep and unitary approach to the reality. The materials used to construct this unified approach are taken from many sources: Theoretical physics, ecology, the philosophy of science and mind, anthropology, phenomenological and process sociology, cognitive sciences, political science, pragmatics, history, systems theory, approaches to complexity and obviously sociolinguistics, are all involved in a dialogue in this desire for integration. (shrink)

With the message that everything in a sense is alive, thus allowing us to join forces with new politico-ethical communities stretching across human and nonhuman realms, the new materialisms have captivated the minds of many academics, artists, and intellectuals by stressing that it is time to return to a premodern mindset and discard modernity and its concepts of secularization, autonomy, and finitude. The Embarrassment of Being Human not only demonstrates how these magical materialisms are beset by grave theoretical (...) and practical inconsistencies and self-contradictions. It also demonstrates how their demand for humans to step down and allow for an emancipation of things qualifies the new materialisms as a metaphysics of neoliberalism that reproduces and fortifies the self-contradictions rampant in the current neoliberal hegemony. While helping us to gain a comprehensive understanding of the tenets of the eerie ills of our epoch, the critique of the new materialisms can furthermore inspire us to appreciate how the exact inversion of the new materialist complex amounts to a revitalization of the modern project. A revitalization that is critical to think our epoch differently. (shrink)

This is the first book to outline a basic philosophy of ecology using the standard categories of academic philosophy: metaphysics, axiology, epistemology, aesthetics, ethics, and political philosophy. The problems of global justice invariably involve ecological factors. Yet the science of ecology is itself imbued with philosophical questions. Therefore, studies in ecological justice, the sub-discipline of global justice that relates to the interaction of human and natural systems, should be preceded by the study of the philosophy of (...) class='Hi'>ecology. This book enables the reader to access a philosophy of ecology and shows how this philosophy is inherently normative and provides tools for securing ecological justice. The moral philosophy of ecology directly addresses the root cause of ecological and environmental injustice: the violation of fundamental human rights caused by the inequitable distribution of the benefits and costs of industrialism. Philosophy of ecology thus has implications for human rights, pollution, poverty, unequal access to resources, sustainability, consumerism, land use, biodiversity, industrialization, energy policy, and other issues of social and global justice. This book offers an historical and interdisciplinary exegesis. The analysis is situated in the context of the Western intellectual tradition, and includes great thinkers in the history of ecological thinking in the West from the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities.​ Keller asks the big questions and surveys answers with remarkable detail. Here is an insightful analysis of contemporary, classical, and ancient thought, alike in the ecological sciences, the humanities, and economics, the roots and fruits of our concepts of nature and of being in the world. Keller is unexcelled in bridging the is/ought gap, bridging nature and culture, and in celebrating the richness of life, its pattern, process, and creativity on our wonderland Earth. Holmes Rolston, III University Distinguished Professor, Colorado State University Author of A New Environmental Ethics: The Next Millennium for Life on Earth Mentored by renowned ecologist Frank Golley and renowned philosopher Frederick Ferré, David Keller is well prepared to provide a deep history and a sweeping synthesis of the "idea of ecology"—including the metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical aspects of that idea, as well as the scientific. J. Baird Callicott University Distinguished Research Professor, University of North Texas Author of Thinking Like a Planet: The Land Ethic and the Earth Ethic. (shrink)

In the nearly 30 years since Premack and Woodruff famously asked, “Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?”, the question of exactly how much non‐human primates understand about the mental lives of others has had an unusually dramatic history. As little as ten years ago it appeared that the answer would be a simple one, with early investigations of non‐human primates’ mentalistic abilities yielding a steady stream of negative findings. Indeed, by the mid‐1990s even very cautious (...) researchers were ready to flatly assert that Theory of Mind was a uniquely human capacity. Recently, however, an exciting new theoretical perspective on primate social cognition has arisen, and with it the distinct possibility that our evolutionary relatives may understand far more of the social world than we previously believed. In this paper we review new theory and evidence suggesting that non‐human primates may indeed represent the mental states of others, at least within the domains for which their distinctive social ecology has prepared them. Having asserted that Premack and Woodruff's original question can be answered with a qualified yes, we then consider the new questions that arise in its place, particularly how and why our own Theory of Mind became more domain‐general than that of other primates. (shrink)

The relationship between Marxism and ecology has been sullied by Martinez-Alier's influential interpretation of Engels's reaction to the agricultural energetics of Sergei Podolinsky. This introduction to the first English translation of Podolinsky's 1883 Die Neue Zeit piece evaluates Martinez-Alier's interpretation in light of the four distinct but closely related articles Podolinsky published over the years 1880–3. This evaluation also emphasises the important but previously underrated role of energy analysis in Marx's Capital. Engels's criticisms of Podolinsky are found to be (...) quite justified from both political-economy and ecological perspectives. From the standpoint of Marx and Engels's metabolic and class-relational approach to production, Podolinsky's attempt to reduce use-value to energy is fraught with problems. Podolinsky's energy reductionism does not even come close to representing an alternative value analysis – let alone a groundbreaking perspective on ecological history – as was suggested by Martinez-Alier. Far from Marx and Engels's vision of communism as an ecologically sustainable and coevolutionary human development, Podolinsky's conception of human labor as an energy accumulation machine seems to uncritically mimic the standpoint of the capitalist interested in using nature only to extract as much energy throughput as possible from the labour-power of the worker. (shrink)

New insights into the microbiome, epigenetics, and cognition are radically challenging our very idea of what it means to be 'human', while an explosion of neo-materialist thinking in the humanities has fostered a renewed appreciation of the formative powers of a dynamic material environment. The Matter of History brings these scientific and humanistic ideas together to develop a bold new post-anthropocentric understanding of the past, one that reveals how powerful organism and things help to create humans in all (...) their dimensions, biological, social, and cultural."--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

This elegant treatise examines the nature of kindness through the fascinating lenses and contexts of ancient, medieval and contemporary philosophy, natural history, theories of mind, of natural selection, eco-psychology and sociobiology. It challenges the reader to consider the myriad potential consequences of human behavior, examining various iconographic moments from the history of art and science as a precursor to the concept and vital potentials for ecological conversion. Focusing on the fundamental mechanisms of reciprocity among humans, other species, (...) communities and nations, Tobias and Morrison lead readers on a remarkable journey whose itinerary, and the provocative questions explored, seek to affirm a pattern in evolution and in human thought that is emphatically oriented towards benevolence, not tyranny. Prosociality in all species - making others happy, kind gestures at any and every juncture of life - has, as a discipline of enquiry, enjoyed a social scientific renaissance during the last decade. Can natural selection move rapidly enough to meet that ultimate challenge? Can our species re-evolve in real time, moving from the ideas, to the ideals, to their applied engineering in a real world that is ecologically hemorrhaging? Which all the critical moral and cognitive changes in social communion such new human nature, as the Authors suggest, clearly requires? This groundbreaking work of ecological philosophy, with its roots in ancient Greek thought, represents a radical break with nearly every traditional scientific paradigm, in exploring the intuitive geography and dramatic questions of ourselves - each and every one of us - that will prove crucial to the survival of our species, and all those we co-habit this miraculous planet with. (shrink)

The human body was made legible long ago. But what of the human mind? Is it possible to ‘read’ the mind, for one human being to know what another is thinking or feeling, their beliefs and intentions. And if I can read your mind, how about others – could our authorities, in the criminal justice system or the security services? Some developments in contemporary neuroscience suggest the answer to this question is ‘yes’. While philosophers continue to debate (...) the mind-brain problem, a range of novel technologies of brain imaging have been used to argue that specific mental states, and even specific thoughts, can be identified by characteristic patterns of brain activation; this has led some to propose their use in practices ranging from lie detection and security screening to the assessment of brain activity in persons in persistent vegetative states. This article reviews the history of these developments, sketches their scientific and technical bases, considers some of the epistemological and ontological mutations involved, explores the ecological niches where they have found a hospitable environment, and considers some implications of this materialization of the readable, knowable, transparent mind. (shrink)

This book encourages readers to acknowledge humanity's contribution to the environmental crisis, proposing a way forward by exploring the power of ordinary people to bring about large-scale cultural change. Is it possible for humankind to change its ways and shed the belief that the planet is ours to do with as we like? Internationally acclaimed philosopher of education Jane Roland Martin argues that "humancentrism" is a learned affair, and what is learned can be unlearned. Turning to the past to see (...) how large-scale cultural change has occurred, she discovers a pattern in the achievements of such historical luminaries as Martin Luther, Mahatma Gandhi, Rosa Parks and Greta Thunberg that we too can follow. Drawing on history, philosophy, and literature as well as the natural and social sciences and hoping to mobilize readers to effective action, Martin employs an accessible and powerful rhetoric, with each chapter beginning with a scene from history written in dialogue form. This book calls on young and old to avert a looming tragedy of Aristotelian proportions--the demise of the "Mother Nature" that made it possible for our species to flourish. Thoroughly interdisciplinary in its approach, it will appeal to students and teachers as well as general readers interested in environmental studies, philosophy, and education. (shrink)

We are living a historical phase in which phenomena of enormous significance intersect: the digital turn, the “ecological transition”, the pandemic contingency, against the backdrop of a unique event in the history of human civilization and of Earth itself: for the first time behaviours and choices of a living species are among the main causes of a biotic transition.The way of thinking, planning, building cities and houses faces with new scenarios. Human and social sciences are called to (...) a deep and fundamental reflection, in the sign of complexity and of the overcoming of scientisms. This contribution, starting from a radical re-thinking of dwelling, intends to provide a critical review of some concrete perspectives of “urban and housing transition” towards new spatial and relational models. (shrink)