Synopsis
Featuring contributions from key names in the field alongside some of the most exciting new voices, this collection presents cutting-edge work on species extinction from a wide variety of perspectives across the environmental humanities.
Biodiversity loss threatens to transform the ecological foundations of all biological life on the planet, yet solutions to this crisis are fiercely contested. This book addresses extinction – along with climate change, the most urgent environmental crisis of the twenty-first century - by exploring species decline and conservation with a particular emphasis on divergent cultural framings, temporal scales, and media.
Contributors explore what ethical guidelines underlie acceptable and unacceptable ways of interacting with plants and animals, what social, aesthetic, and affective perceptions and meanings are attributed to particular species, how human-nonhuman relations are construed as part of a particular social order and which species are considered worth conserving, and at what cost.
Drawing on the disciplines of anthropology, cultural geography, environmental history, philosophy, literary studies, media studies, and studies of religion, this book explores how the engagement with biodiversity loss challenges basic assumptions in these disciplines and opens up new avenues of thought and activism for shaping the multispecies communities of the future.
About the Authors
Roman Bartosch is Full Professor of Teaching Anglophone Literatures and Cultures and Director of the Interdisciplinary Research Centre for Teaching in the Humanities at the University of Cologne, Germany.
Steven Hartman is Visiting Professor of English at Mälardalen University in Sweden and Associate Scientist at Stefansson Arctic Institute in Iceland. His work focuses on environmental memory in literature; integrating the humanities in global change research and policy; and building collaborations among artists, researchers, educators and civil society to help mobilize public action on climate change. In 2020 he is co-leading efforts to launch BRIDGES, a humanities-centered global coalition for sustainability science, in close cooperation with UNESCO and the International Council for Philosophy and Human Sciences (CIPSH). He also directs the Humanities for the Environment Circumpolar Observatory anchored at the Stefansson Arctic Institute in Iceland and for over a decade he led the Nordic Network for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies (NIES). Together with Dr. Astrid Ogilvie, he co-leads the international research project Reflections of Change: The Natural World in Literary and Historical Sources from Iceland ca. AD 800 to 1800 (ICECHANGE) funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (2017-2020). An article from this project, “Medieval Iceland, Greenland and the New Human Condition: a case study in integrated environmental humanities,” for which he was lead author, won the biennial St. Andrews Article Prize in European Environmental History in 2019. Hartman's publications have appeared in a wide range of scholarly, scientific and literary journals, including PMLA, Global and Planetary Change, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Ecozon@, the New York Review of Books Online, The Holocene, Agni Online, the Southern Review, Witness and the Georgia Review, as well as in anthologies from academic publishers such as Cambridge UP, Routledge, Wiley-Blackwell and Brill.
Ursula K. Heise holds the Marcia H. Howard Term Chair in Literary Studies in the Department of English and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA, USA.
Parker Krieg is a postdoctoral fellow in environmental humanities at the University of Helsinki, Finland, affiliated with the Humanities program in the Faculty of Arts and the Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science. His dissertation, Nature Industries: U.S. Environmental Fictions after Fordism, 1971-2011, examines the transformation of environmental narratives in the political and cultural economy of post-Fordism. His recent publications include “Energy Futures: John Updike's Petrofictions,” in Studies in American Fiction; “Planetary Delta: Anthropocene Lives in the Blues Memoir,” in A/B: Auto/Biography Studies; “Carnival Anthropocene: Myth and Cultural Memory in Monique Roffey's Archipelago,” in Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture, and Environment. Book chapters in forthcoming collections are currently with Bloomsbury, Routledge, and West Virginia University Press. As a member of the Humanities for the Environment (HfE) Circumpolar Observatory, he co-edits a special issue of the journal Humanities on Food Culture and Critical Sustainability. Other associations include Modern Language Association, Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, Cultural Studies Association, and the European Association of American Studies. His co-edited collection, Situating Sustainability: A Handbook of Contexts and Concepts, is currently under review with Helsinki University Press.
Kate Rigby is Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Environmental Humanities and Director of the research hub for Multidisciplinary Environmental Studies in the Humanities at the University of Cologne, Germany. One of the world's foremost ecocritics, she was the founding President of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (Australia-New Zealand). Her previous books include Topographies of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism (2004) and Dancing with Disaster: Environmental Histories, Narratives, and Ethics for Perilous Times (2015).
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
