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In Erosion, Gina Caison traces how American authors and photographers have grappled with soil erosion as a material reality that shapes narratives of identity, belonging, and environment. Examining canonical American texts and photography, including John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, Octavia Butler's Parable series, John Audubon's Louisiana writings, and Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother, Caison shows how concerns over erosion reveal anxieties of disappearance that are based in the legacies of settler colonialism. Soil loss not only occupies a complex metaphorical place in the narrative of American identity; it becomes central to preserving the white settler colonial state through Indigenous dispossession and erasure. At the same time, Caison examines how Indigenous texts and art such as Lynn Riggs's play Green Grow the Lilacs, Karenne Wood's poetry, and Monique Verdin's photography challenge colonial narratives of the continent by outlining the material stakes of soil loss for their own communities. From California to Oklahoma to North Carolina's Outer Banks, Caison ultimately demonstrates that concerns over erosion reverberate into issues of climate change, land ownership, Indigenous sovereignty, race, and cultural and national identity.

Concentrating on a powerful, emerging genre, Tatiana Konrad's Climate Change Fiction and Ecocultural Crisis provides a survey of popular narratives that further our understanding of climate change in contemporary fiction. Konrad advocates for the expansion and redefinition of the cli-fi genre and argues that industrial fiction from the nineteenth century is the first example of climate change fiction. Tracing the ways through which cli-fi outlines a history of our modern ecocultural crisis, this book demonstrates how the genre employs four major thematic clusters to achieve this narrative: weather, science, religion, and place. Focusing on a diverse range of issues, including fossil fuels, cheap energy, the intricacies of human–more-than-human relationships, and postcolonial geographies, Konrad illustrates how cli-fi transcends mere storytelling. The genre ultimately emerges as an important means to forecast, imagine, and contemplate climatic events. The book invites a broadening of the environmental humanities discourse, asking readers not only to deepen their understanding of the current climate crisis, but also to consider how cli-fi culture can be viewed as an effective method to address climate change.

How did ancient Greeks and Romans perceive their environments: did they see order or chaos, chance or control? And how do their views compare to modern perceptions? Conversing with Chaos in Graeco-Roman Antiquity challenges prevailing ideas that ancient perceptions of the non-human world rested on a profound belief in universal order, and that the cosmos was harmonious and under human control. Engaging with the concept of chaos in both its ancient and modern meanings, and focusing on the ancient Mediterranean and Near East, this book reveals another sense of environmental awareness, one that paid equal attention to chance and chaos, and the sometimes-fatal consequences of human interventions in nature. Bringing together a team of international scholars, the volume investigates the experience of the interaction of humans with the environment, as reflected in ancient evidence from myths and philosophical treatises, to epigraphic evidence and archaeological remains. The contributors consider the role of the human in the formation of perspectives about the natural world and explore themes of agency, affordances, ecophobia, gender and temporality. Overall, the volume reveals how, in ancient imaginations, environments were perceived as living entities with their own agency, and respondent (or even vulnerable) to human actions and decision-making. It highlights how modern insights can enrich our understanding of the past, and demonstrates the increasing relevance of ancient historical research for reflecting on current relations to the natural world.

Advances our understanding of the literary legacy of contemporary ecological crises to investigate the interfaces of humanity and natureOffers original biotic readings of this literature to showcase the often strange and surprising ways in which humans are intimately connected to animals, plants, and mineralsDrawing upon historical and contemporary developments in the biological sciences, The Ecology of British and American Empire Writing gives Robert Louis Stevenson's peculiar fascination with Mimosa pudica (sensitive plant) the long overdue critical attention that it deserves, and, in doing so, does for plants what the field of animal studies has done for other non-human creatures of empire: cattle, sheep, rats, etcInnovatively develops a series of transoceanic connections to showcase not only the ways in which colonialist texts anticipate contemporary crises of ecological mismanagement, but also how a world-ecological approach to literary study necessarily invites readers to think beyond various geopolitical and chronological boundariesExplores troubling eco-feminist connections between the brutality of global capitalism, gender, and evolutionary biology vis-à-vis women's struggle for survival in the Caribbean plantation economyDraws extensively upon archival materials, including The Jamaica Magazine, unpublished manuscripts, such as the Caribbean travel diaries of Henrietta Marchant Liston and the journals of John Ker (a surgeon's mate in the Royal Navy), and the photo albums of Stevenson's cousin, Sir Graham BalfourHighlights the significance of place-based research, including how specific natures in particular locations impact literary production (and vice versa) At this critical juncture in which the biodiversity of planet Earth appears to be shrinking fast and furiously, Louis Kirk McAuley invites us to consider the ways in which particular unruly natures, including animals, plants and minerals, actively intervene in literature to decentre the human. Drawing upon invasion biology, McAuley offers transformative ecocritical interpretations of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and American literature and highlights the heterarchical nature of empire building. This includes analyses of texts composed by (or about) persons residing at, or just outside, the edges of the British and American Empires, including St Kitts and Nevis, Haiti, Cuba, Hawaii and Samoa, which were built around the global transfer of animals and plants. Offering biotic readings of this literature, McAuley highlights the human place in nature and provides practical literary examples of the ways oceans facilitate the confusion of time and place.

This book demonstrates how humans can become sensitized to, and intervene in, environmental degradation by writing, reading, analyzing, and teaching poetry. It offers both theoretical and practice-based essays, providing a diversity of approaches and voices that will be useful in the classroom and beyond.The chapters in this edited collection explore how poetry can make readers climate-ready and climate-responsive through creativity, empathy, and empowerment. The book encompasses work from or about Oceania, Africa, Europe, North America, Asia, and Antarctica, integrating poetry into discussions of specific local and global issues, including the value of Indigenous responses to climate change; the dynamics of climate migration; the shifting boundaries between the human and more-than-human world; the ecopoetics of the prison-industrial complex; and the ongoing environmental effects of colonialism, racism, and sexism. With numerous examples of how poetry reading, teaching, and learning can enhance or modify mindsets, the book focuses on offering creative, practical approaches and tools that educators can implement into their teaching and equipping them with the theoretical knowledge to support these.This volume will appeal to educational professionals engaged in teaching environmental, sustainability, and development topics, particularly from a humanities-led perspective.

Unraveling the surprising history of the concept of ecologyThe Ecological Plot traces the roots of this most mainstream branch of science back to an unexpected source: narrative storytelling. Weaving together the histories of different disciplines, John MacNeill Miller shows how pioneering thinkers drew on a shared set of literary techniques to imagine how different species could work together as a single, interdependent community, redefining the way we conceptualize the natural world. Beginning with a series of revolutionary exchanges between the political economist Thomas Robert Malthus, the writer Harriet Martineau, and the naturalist Charles Darwin, The Ecological Plot identifies the foundations of modern notions of ecology, economics, and realist fiction, maps how they evolved through the works of Victorian writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, and shows how they resurfaced in the works of Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson a century later. Miller's book reveals why our most sophisticated efforts to explain humanity's relationship to nature have been segregated into different disciplines and makes an argument for the importance of bringing these separate ways of understanding the world back together as a crucial step toward solving the environmental, economic, and ethical problems of the present.

Situated between Europe and Asia, and surrounded by three seas, Turkey comprises a diverse environmental and cultural tapestry. Ecocriticism and Turkey is the first in-depth study to explore Turkish literary and cultural engagements with the environment. Ergin examines a wide range of ecocritical issues across four thematically organized chapters: “Sea,” “Climate,” “Routes,” and “Animals.” Each chapter addresses various dimensions of anthropogenic ecological change and highlights the role of literature in inspiring hope and action.The book takes readers on various journeys from the coasts of the Aegean Sea to the mountains of Eastern Anatolia. Ergin converses with both twentieth-century writers to shed new light on familiar texts and contemporary writers to capture emerging perspectives, including Rum, Laz, Kurdish, and Armenian voices in her discussion. The study is further enriched by an interdisciplinary inquiry that brings literature into dialogue with climate science, political history, underwater photography, folk music, and bio-art.

La obra literaria de Homero Aridjis constituye una de las trayectorias más sólidas del ámbito hispánico contemporáneo, atravesada por las preocupaciones medioambientales que muestra el escritor mexicano desde muy temprano. Este hecho coloca su literatura entre las más comprometidas con el medioambiente, y por tanto, con la humanidad misma, y la sitúa en la corriente ecocrítica. La presente monografía es un estudio abarcador de la obra de Aridjis, quien ha publicado numerosos libros de poesía, novelas, piezas teatro, ensayos y escritos ambientalistas. Cada una de estas parcelas es abordada desde su contexto creación, atendiendo a las coordenadas históricas y socioculturales mexicanas y mundiales, ya que desde muy temprano Aridjis se inserta en la gran tradición occidental. Si hubiera que resumir el calibre de su vasta obra, cabría aplicar al autor aquello que dijo Doris Lessing de otro grande, J.M. Coetzee:'No se limitaba a mantenerse en contacto con la mejor tradición, sino que él mismo era la tradición'. Hasta la fecha, no se había llevado a cabo un examen tan completo de la literatura aridjisiana, por lo que esta monografía viene a llenar un vacío en los estudios de ámbito hispánico.

The Rights of Nature and the Testimony of Things begins by analyzing the ethical debates and political contexts relating to Latin American “rights of nature” legislation and the political ontology of nonhuman speech within a framework of intercultural and multispecies diplomacy. Author Mark Anderson shows how Latin American authors and thinkers complicate traditional humanistic perspectives on nature, the social, and politics, exploring how animals, plants, and environments as a whole might be said to engage in social relations and political speech or self-representation. Drawing Native Amazonian thought into productive tension with a variety of posthumanist theoretical frameworks—ranging from Derrida's conceptualization of passive decision and hospitality to biosemiotics, Karen Barad's theorization of intra-activity, and Isabelle Stengers'proposal for cosmopolitical diplomacy—Anderson analyzes literary works by Julio Cortázar, Clarice Lispector, José Eustasio Rivera, and Davi Kopenawa that reframe environmental ethics in terms of collective, multispecies work and reciprocal care and politics as a cosmopolitics of friendship rooted in diplomacy across difference. Finally, Anderson examines the points of connection and divergences between Latin American relational ontologies and Euro American posthumanist theories within Indigenous Latin American remodernization projects that reappropriate and repurpose ancestral practices as well as develop new technologies with the goal of forging alternative modernities compatible with a livable future for all species.

Global Literature and the Environment analyses literatures from across the world that connect readers to the localized impacts of the climate and ecological emergencies. The book contextualizes ecological breakdown within the history of imperialist-capitalism, exploring how literature helps us to imagine and create a habitable and just world for all forms of life.The four chapters are organised according to the elements of the climate system that are at risk. ‘Earth'examines Caribbean, American, South African, and British literatures that explore how dominant human groups have exploited soils, minerals, metals, and oil in pursuit of economic aims. ‘Water'engages with poetic representations of, and responses to, extraction, pollution, and global warming in the fresh- and saltwaters of Nigeria and the icescapes of Alaska. ‘Air'analyses prose and poetry that depicts atmospheric pollution caused by gas flaring in the Niger Delta and the production of pesticides in India. ‘Life'attends to the ways in which literature contextualizes the drivers of, and proposed solutions to, mass species extinction across North America, Africa, Australasia, and Aotearoa New Zealand.This accessible and engaging book explores novels, plays and poetry by writers including Octavia Butler, C.L.R. James, dg nanouk okpik, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Imbolo Mbue, Indra Sinha, Witi Ihimaera, J.M. Coetzee, and Henrietta Rose-Innes, amongst many others. It introduces readers to the concept of the Anthropocene alongside perspectives that challenge the assumption that the climate crisis is caused by an undifferentiated humanity. In doing so, the book draws on, and combines, a range of theoretical approaches, including postcolonialism, Indigenous studies, ecocriticism, cultural materialism, and animal studies.

Ibero-American Ecocriticism: Cultural and Social Explorations presents a distinct view of the diverse social and physical geographies of the Americas, their political and cultural connections to the Iberian Peninsula, and their relationship to the environment in its diverse representations. The topics ranging from myths and legends, poetics, young adult literature, arts and performance, to cinematography by women dialogue across chapters reveal a persistent usage of nature and environment as recurrent themes. Through visual and plastic arts, as well as poetic narratives of social utopias/dystopias, the contributors provide original readings on the effects of societal views and struggles to protect and consciously exploit the natural world. The uniqueness of this book relies therefore on the geographical and cultural approach to the poetics of nature and its metaphorical and physical embodiment, place and geography through utopian and dystopian world recreation and representation, and finally the nexus with ecology and social actors.

The Routledge Handbook of Crime Fiction and Ecology is the first comprehensive examination of crime fiction and ecocriticism. Across 33 innovative chapters from leading international scholars, this Handbook considers an emergent field of contemporary crime narratives that are actively responding to a diverse assemblage of global environmental concerns, whilst also opening up ‘classic'crime fictions and writers to new ecocritical perspectives. Rigorously engaged with cutting-edge critical trends, it places the familiar staples of crime fiction scholarship – from thematic to formal approaches – in conversation with a number of urgent ecological theories and ideas, covering subjects such as environmental security, environmental justice, slow violence, ecofeminism and animal studies. The Routledge Handbook of Crime Fiction and Ecology is an essential introduction to this new and dynamic research field for both students and scholars alike.