culture

Ferran Pons Raga reviews Naturalezas en conflicto [Natures in Conflict] by José A. Cortés Vázquez.

Douglas Sheil reviews the book Traditional Forest-Related Knowledge Sustaining Communities, Ecosystems and Biocultural Diversity by John A. Parrotta and Ronald L. Trosper.

Stefan Skrimshire considers the ethical question of how to communicate with future human societies in terms of long-term disposal of radioactive fuel. He proposes that the confessional form (as propagated by Saint Augustine and critiqued by Derrida) may become increasingly pertinent to activists, artists, and faith communities making sense of humanity’s ethical commitments in deep time.

Jonathan Woolley borrows the folkloristic, East Anglia figure of Black Shuck, a devilish hound, and connects it to a narrative of the Anthropocene based on the notions of inescapable mortality, deep time, and responsibility.

The authors put forward the idea of “speculative geology” to explain the violence inherent in volcanism, drawing on three volcanic episodes and the more recent unexpected striking of magma in Iceland’s Krafla volcanic caldera.

Considering Caroline Wendling’s living artwork White Wood (2014) in northeast Scotland, the author examines the relationship between deep time, ecology, and enchantment.

The authors introduce a special section of Environmental Humanities on manifestations of deep time through places, objects, and practices, focusing on three modes through which it is encountered: enchantment, violence, and haunting.

The authors detail their experience of Puchuncavi, the largest, oldest, and most polluting industrial area in Chile. They approach it from a multidisciplinary viewpoint as an experience of the Anthropocene and advocate for an enhanced pedagogy of care born of our inherited pasts and of engagement, interest, and becoming as response-ability.

Matthew Schneider-Mayerson investigates the impact of climate fiction on American readers through a qualitative survey, and assesses the results based on concepts borrowed from ecocriticism, environmental psychology, and environmental communication.

In the context of current concerns within the environmental humanities to challenge the idea that humans are somehow irreducible to nature, the authors in this article take up the much-neglected history of the idea of human exceptionality itself, arguing that this form of humanist discourse often forgets its own contingencies and instabilities, and its comprehensively violent inheritances.