North Carolina's magnificent Blue Ridge Mountains have drawn people to the Swannanoa Valley since the beginning of time. Rivers and forests lured early hunters and gatherers; later inhabitants tilled the rich, fertile soil and logged the thick forests on the mountainsides. People also came to the mountains to enjoy the mystical beauty and enchantment of the area, the cool, crisp climate, and the sparkling waters of brooks and streams. Hiking, camping, and the tranquility of a woodland world provided escape from city life. The Swannanoa Valley is cradled between the Craggy Mountains to the north and the Swannanoa Mountains to the south. Mount Mitchell, the highest peak in America east of the Mississippi River, rises majestically nearby. Among the early visitors who decided to settle in the valley were those who purchased the land that later became the sites of the famous conference centers in the area-Montreat, YMCA Blue Ridge Assembly, and Ridgecrest-and businessmen, who brought industry to the area.

The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities provides a comprehensive, transnational, and interdisciplinary map to the field, offering a broad overview of its founding principles while providing insight into exciting new directions for future scholarship. Articulating the significance of humanistic perspectives for our collective social engagement with ecological crises, the volume explores the potential of the environmental humanities for organizing humanistic research, opening up new forms of interdisciplinarity, and shaping public debate and policies on environmental issues. Sections cover: The Anthropocene and the Domestication of Earth Posthumanism and Multispecies Communities Inequality and Environmental Justice Decline and Resilience: Environmental Narratives, History, and Memory Environmental Arts, Media, and Technologies The State of the Environmental Humanities The first of its kind, this companion covers essential issues and themes, necessarily crossing disciplines within the humanities and with the social and natural sciences. Exploring how the environmental humanities contribute to policy and action concerning some of the key intellectual, social, and environmental challenges of our times, the chapters offer an ideal guide to this rapidly developing field.

The notion of the Anthropocene is founded on the premise that traces of human activity on the earth will remain legible in the geological strata for millions of years to come, showing evidence of an anthropogenic ‘signature’ inscribed in the rock by the human species. Spectrality and Survivance shows how embedded in this understanding of the Anthropocene is a speculative and specular gesture that transforms the notion of the future into an anthropocentric reflection of the present, prohibiting any true engagement with the possibility of a non-anthropocentric and post-anthropocenic world. In this volume, Marija Grech develops an alternative conceptual paradigm from which to think the Anthropocene beyond any limited notion of human language, human thought, human systems of meaning, or even a human world. Grech considers how the geological trace of the Anthropocene might be said to ‘survive’ outside of the possibility of any human readership, and how the very survival of the human in and beyond the Anthropocene might necessitate such thought.

Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony: The Recovery of Tradition is a study of the embedded texts that function as the formal and thematic backbone of Leslie Marmon Silko's 1977 novel. Robert M. Nelson identifies the Keresan and Navajo ethnographic pretexts that Silko reappropriates and analyzes the many ways these texts relate to the surrounding prose narrative.

"Featuring a Gallery readers group guide"--P. [4] of cover.

Origen was the most influential Christian theologian before Augustine, the founder of Biblical study as a serious discipline in the Christian tradition, and a figure with immense influence on the development of Christian spirituality. This volume presents a comprehensive and accessible insight into Origen's life and writings. An introduction analyzes the principal influences that formed him as a Christian and as a thinker, his emergence as a mature theologian at Alexandria, his work in Caesarea and his controversial legacy. Fresh translations of a representative selection of Origen's writings, including some never previously available in print, show how Origen provided a lasting framework for Christian theology by finding through study of the Bible a coherent understanding of God's saving plan.

Each year, thousands of tourists visit Mount Mitchell, the most prominent feature of North Carolina's Black Mountain range and the highest peak in the eastern United States. From Native Americans and early explorers to land speculators and conservationists, people have long been drawn to this rugged region. Timothy Silver explores the long and complicated history of the Black Mountains, drawing on both the historical record and his experience as a backpacker and fly fisherman. He chronicles the geological and environmental forces that created this intriguing landscape, then traces its history of environmental change and human intervention from the days of Indian-European contact to today. Among the many tales Silver recounts is that of Elisha Mitchell, the renowned geologist and University of North Carolina professor for whom Mount Mitchell is named, who fell to his death there in 1857. But nature's stories--of forest fires, chestnut blight, competition among plants and animals, insect invasions, and, most recently, airborne toxins and acid rain--are also part of Silver's narrative, making it the first history of the Appalachians in which the natural world gets equal time with human history. It is only by understanding the dynamic between these two forces, Silver says, that we can begin to protect the Black Mountains for future generations.

The first scientific introduction to youth climate distress, related psychological issues, and how individuals working with youth can help.