Bøger i Elements in Environmental Humanities serien

Anthroposcreens frames the 'climate unconscious' as a reading strategy for film and television productions during the Anthropocene. Drawing attention to the affects of climate change and the broader environmental damage of the Anthropocene, this study mobilizes its frame in concert with other tools from cultural and film studies¿such as debates over Black representation¿to provide readings of the underlying environmental themes in Black American and Norwegian screen texts. These bodies of work provide a useful counterpoint to the dominance of white Anglo-American stories in cli-fi while also ranging beyond the boundaries of the cli-fi genre to show how the climate unconscious lens functions in a broader set of texts. Working across film studies, cultural studies, Black studies, and the environmental humanities, Anthroposcreens establishes a cross-disciplinary reading strategy of the 'climate unconscious' for contemporary film and television productions. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This Element follows the development of humans in constantly changing climates and environments from Homo erectus 1.9 million years ago, to fully modern humans who moved out of Africa to Europe and Asia 70,000 years ago. Biosemiotics reveals meaningful communication among coevolving members of the intricately connected life forms on this dynamic planet. Within this web hominins developed culture from bipedalism and meat-eating to the use of fire, stone tools, and clothing, allowing wide migrations and adaptations. Archaeology and ancient DNA analysis show how fully modern humans overlapped with Neanderthals and Denisovans before emerging as the sole survivors of the genus Homo 35,000 years ago. Their visions of the world appear in magnificent cave paintings and bone sculptures of animals, then more recently in written narratives like the Gilgamesh epic and Euripides' Bacchae whose images still haunt us with anxieties about human efforts to control the natural world.

This Element will develop a counter-hegemonic narrative based on earthcare labour - or the 'forces of reproduction'. Adopting a narrative justice approach, and placing feminist political ecology right at the core of its critique of the Anthropocene storyline, this Element offers a novel contribution to the environmental humanities.

This Element provides an accessible introduction to ecosemiotics and demonstrates its pertinence for the study of today's unstable culture-nature relations. Ecosemiotics can be defined as the study of sign processes responsible for ecological phenomena. The arguments in this Element are developed in three steps that take inspiration from both humanities and biological sciences: 1) Showing the diversity, reach and effects of sign-mediated relations in the natural environment from the level of a single individual up the functioning of the ecosystem. 2) Demonstrating numerous ways in which prelinguistic semiotic relations are part of culture and identifying detrimental environmental effects that self-contained and purely symbol-based sign systems, texts and discourses bring along. 3) Demonstrating how ecosemiotic analysis centred on models and modelling can effectively map relations between texts and the natural environment, or the lack thereof, and how this methodology can be used artistically to initiate environmentally friendly cultural forms and practices.

Humans may live in the Anthropocene, but this does not affect all in the same way. How would the Anthropocene look if, instead of searching its traces in the geosphere, researchers would look for them in the organosphere, in the ecologies of humans in their entanglements with the environment? Looking at this embodied stratigraphy of power and toxicity, more than the Anthropocene, we will discover the Wasteocene. The imposition of wasting relationships on subaltern human and more-than-human communities implies the construction of toxic ecologies made of contaminating substances and narratives. While official accounts have systematically erased any trace of those wasting relationships, another kind of narrative has been written in flesh, blood, and cells. Traveling between Naples (Italy) and Agbogbloshie (Ghana), science fiction and epidemic outbreaks, this Element will take the readers into the bowels of the Wasteocene, but it will also indicate the commoning practices which are dismantling it.

The distinction between humans and the natural world is an artefact and more a matter of linguistic communication than a conceptual separation. This Element proposes ecosemiotics as an epistemological tool to better understand the relationship between human and natural processes. Ecosemiotics with its affinity to the humanities, is presented here as the best disciplinary approach for interpreting complex environmental conditions for a broad audience, across a multitude of temporal and spatial scales. It is proposed as an intellectual bridge between divergent sciences to incorporate within a unique framework different paradigms. The ecosemiotic paradigm helps to explain how organisms interact with their external environments using mechanisms common to all living beings that capture external information and matter for internal usage. This paradigm can be applied in all the circumstances where a living being (man, animal, plant, fungi, etc.) performs processes to stay alive.

Italo Calvino's Animals explores Anthropocene animals through the visionary eyes of a classic modern author. Animals emerge as complex subjects and inhabitants of a world under siege. Beside them, another figure appears in the mirror: that of an anthropos without a capital A, epitome of subaltern humans with their challenges and inequalities.

In recent years, the word 'virus' has lost its biological perimeter of reference to acquire a much broader - could say 'paradigmatic' - meaning. This Element aims to shed light on how virality has become the most powerful metaphor available to describe very different phenomena.

This Element provides a novel framework for understanding the nature of violence against animals. The author argues that the search for human uniqueness (an 'anthropological difference') is at the heart of this violence and should be replaced by a way of life based on the notion of human and animals being indistinct.

This Element aims to show why the ancient tradition still matters in the Anthropocene. Revisiting ancient materials alongside central concepts of contemporary environmental theory, Schliephake offers new perspectives and argues that classical ecological knowledge is a powerful resource for creating alternative world views.

Analysis of Petroglyphic rock art in three valleys of Mongolia's Altai Mountains begins to explain the rhythm of cultural manifestations: where rock art appears, when it disappears, and why. The material and this remote arena offer an ideal laboratory to study the intersection of prehistoric culture and paleoenvironment.