"The Affective Legacy of Silent Spring"
Alex Lockwood tries to measure the importance of Rachel Carson’s work in its affective influence on contemporary environmental writing across the humanities.
Alex Lockwood tries to measure the importance of Rachel Carson’s work in its affective influence on contemporary environmental writing across the humanities.
Mark Huxham and David Sumner assess the case of the Brent Spar, discussing some of the lessons that should be learnt from the incident by policy makers and scientists.
Gordon M. Sayre explores the metaphor of a species as a book, represented in the Alexandrian library. He argues that this obscures the fact that the Alexandrian library consisted of manuscripts, not print books and that, in essence, species may be more like manuscripts than books after all.
Stefan Helmreich’s foreword to a Special Section on Familiarizing the Extraterrestrial / Making Our Planet Alien, edited by Istvan Praet and Juan Francisco Salazar, concludes that the anthropology of outer space these days is a machine for chaotic and cosmic travel, chrono-synclastic infundibulation, and analogical involution, a wrinkle in the discipline and its companion fields that changes what can count as both the “environment” and the “humanities.”
In this introduction to their Special Section “Familiarizing the Extraterrestrial / Making Our Planet Alien,” editors Istvan Praet and Juan Francisco Salazar discuss the growing research on the wider universe and how it is apprehended by modern cosmology, and how the extraterrestrial has become part of the remit of anthropologists, philosophers, historians, geographers, scholars in science and technology studies, and artistic researchers, among others.
The authors develop “composting” as a metaphor for their two main arguments: that certain feminist concepts and commitments are foundational to the environmental humanities, and that more inclusive feminist composting is necessary for the future of the field.
Drawing on Continental theory and various cultural objects, On an Ungrounded Earth constructs an eclectic geosophy describing Earth as a dynamic engine materially invading and upsetting our attempts to reduce it to merely the ground beneath our feet.