Embodied Memories, Embedded Healing critically engages with the major East Asian cultural knowledge, beliefs, and practices that influence environmental consciousness in the twenty-first century. This volume examines key thinkers and aspects of Daoist, Confucianist, Buddhist, indigenous, animistic, and neo-Confucianist thought. With a particular focus on animistic perspectives on environmental healing and environmental consciousness, the contributors also engage with media studies (eco-cinema), food studies, critical animal studies, biotechnology, and the material sciences.

Indigenous knowledge of local ecosystems often challenges settler-colonial cosmologies that naturalize resource extraction and the relocation of nomadic, hunting, foraging, or fishing peoples. Questioning Borders explores recent ecoliterature by Han and non-Han Indigenous writers of China and Taiwan, analyzing relations among humans, animals, ecosystems, and the cosmos in search of alternative possibilities for creativity and consciousness. Informed by extensive field research, Robin Visser compares literary works by Bai, Bunun, Kazakh, Mongol, Tao, Tibetan, Uyghur, Wa, Yi, and Han Chinese writers set in Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Southwest China, and Taiwan, sites of extensive development, migration, and climate change impacts. Visser contrasts the dominant Han Chinese cosmology of center and periphery that informs what she calls “Beijing Westerns” with Indigenous and hybridized ways of relating to the world that challenge borders, binaries, and hierarchies. By centering Indigenous cosmologies, this book aims to decolonize approaches to ecocriticism, comparative literature, and Chinese and Sinophone studies as well as to inspire new modes of sustainable flourishing in the Anthropocene.

Chinese Environmental Humanities showcases contemporary ecocritical approaches to Chinese culture and aesthetic production as practiced in China itself and beyond. As the first collaborative environmental humanities project of this kind, this book brings together sixteen scholars from a diverse range of disciplines, including literary and cultural studies, philosophy, ecocinema and ecomedia studies, religious studies, minority studies, and animal or multispecies studies. The fourteen chapters are conceptually framed through the lens of the Chinese term huanjing (environment or “encircling the surroundings”), a critical device for imagining the aesthetics and politics of place-making, or “the practice of environing at the margin.” The discourse of environing at the margins facilitates consideration of the modes, aesthetics, ethics, and politics of environmental inclusion and exclusion, providing a lens into the environmental thinking and practices of the world’s most populous society.

How each of us can become a therapeutic presence in the world. Images and sounds of war, natural disasters, and human-made devastation explicitly surround us and implicitly leave their imprint in our muscles, our belly and heart, our nervous systems, and the brains in our skulls. We each experience more digital data than we are capable of processing in a day, and this is leading to a loss of empathy and human contact. This loss of leisurely, sustained, face-to-face connection is making true presence a rare experience for many of us, and is neurally ingraining fast pace and split attention as the norm. Yet despite all of this, the ability to offer the safe sanctuary of presence is central to effective clinical treatment of trauma and indeed to all of therapeutic practice. It is our challenge to remain present within our culture, Badenoch argues, no matter how difficult this might be. She makes the case that we are built to seek out, enter, and sustain warm relationships, all this connection will allow us to support the emergence of a humane world. In this book, Bonnie Badenoch, a gifted translator of neuroscientific concepts into human terms, offers readers brain- and body-based insights into how we can form deep relational encounters with our clients and our selves and how relational neuroscience can teach us about the astonishing ways we are interwoven with one another. How we walk about in our daily lives will touch everyone, often below the level of conscious awareness. The first part of The Heart of Trauma provides readers with an extended understanding of the ways in which our physical bodies are implicated in our conscious and non-conscious experience. Badenoch then delves even deeper into the clinical implications of moving through the world. She presents a strong, scientifically grounded case for doing the work of opening to hemispheric balance and relational deepening.

Everyday Life Ecologies: Sustainability, Crisis, Resistance is about those complex, sticky, but also open arrangements of bodies, objects, and plants that make up daily existence. The multiple and interlocking lines of a long capitalist crisis disrupt their normal flow: sometimes, they open opportunities for transformation, sometimes else, they foreclose horizons of change. In contrast with approaches that respond to environmental crisis by advocating “sustainable lifestyles” and “responsible behaviors,” Alice Dal Gobbo suggests that it is necessary to address the complex socio-material relationalities that constitute everyday ecologies. Beyond that, the book argues for their politicization, illuminating daily existence as embedded in capitalist relations of re/production. Combining political ecology and new materialist sensitivities, this book investigates the ways in which ecologically damaging logics are inscribed in everyday assemblages through their habitual rehearsal and libidinal hold. But it also points to how apparently banal acts of resistance embody and promote different logics, such as a logic of care and an ecological “aesth-ethics” of desire. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Northeast of Italy, this journey through the concrete matters and beings of daily life in crisis talks beyond this emplaced reality and dialogues with emerging forms of contestation and prefiguration that put socio-ecological reproduction at their center.

For the twentieth-century naturalist and poet Loren Eiseley, the relationship between human beings and the natural world has become unnatural, divided by the era of modern technology. Loren Eiseley’s Writing across the Nature and Culture Divide analyses how the philosopher of science becomes a boundary crosser in time and space. Qianqian Cheng points to Eiseley’s method of uniting science and the humanities to reflect on human evolution and the past and future role of science with a visionary and poetic imagination. Seizing the connectedness of living beings, Eiseley, and now Cheng, makes us aware of the presence of nature even in daily urban life. Qianqian Cheng unveils Eiseley’s merits, showing the poet as a necessary voice in the urgent mission to make individuals realize their responsibility to respond ethically to the living world.

The Emerging Role of Geomedia in the Environmental Humanities, edited by Mark Terry and Michael Hewson, provides the latest scholarship on the various methods and approaches being used by environmental humanists to incorporate geomedia into their research and analyses. Chapters in the book examine such applications as geographic information systems, global positioning systems, geo-doc filmmaking, and related geo-locative systems all being used as new technologies of research and analysis in investigations in the environmental humanities. The contributors also explore how these new methodologies impact the production of knowledge in this field of study as well as promote the impact of First Nation people perspectives.

The Social Life of Unsustainable Mass Consumption draws on a variety of theories and research to contribute to our understanding of unsustainable mass consumption. It addresses the role of identities, social relations, interactions, belonging, and status comparison, and how perceived time scarcity is both a cause and an effect of consumption. It examines the power of consumer norms and how overconsumption is normalized and shows how consumption is embedded in the time-space arrangements of everyday life. Magnus Boström contextualizes such drivers within the larger institutional and infrastructural forces underlying mass consumption, including the economy, growth politics, and the problematic promises of consumer culture. Boström further draws on lessons from lived experiments of consuming less and discuss how insights about the flaws of consumer culture can help shape a growing critique and countermovement – a collective detox from consumerism.

This volume analyses Bangladesh’s human-nature/environment relationships in terms of development victimhood, environmental injustices, and resistance of the marginalized. It demonstrates how the popular GDP-based economic growth model helps governments undertake “development” projects, threatening the environment and livelihood of the poor while benefiting the affluent. It represents the extant environmentalism in the literary works in Bangla, and tales of pollution, depletion; and human-nature/environment symbiosis that shows ways to resist victimhood. Against current environmental challenges and other environmental issues, this volume presents the epitome of how politics, biodiversity, and technology meet in many cross-cutting pathways.

Anticipatory Environmental (Hi)Stories from Antiquity to the Anthropocene studies the interplay of environmental perception and the way societies throughout history have imagined the future state of “nature” and the environments in which coming generations would live. What sorts of knowledge were and are involved in outlining future environments? What kinds of texts and narrative strategies were and are developed and modified over time? How did and do scenarios and narratives of the past shape (hi)stories of the future? This book answers these questions from a diachronic as well as a cross-cultural perspective. By looking at a diverse range of historical evidence that transcends stereotypical utopian and dystopian visions and allows for nuanced insights beyond the dichotomous reservoir of pastoral motifs and apocalyptic narratives, the contributors illustrate the multifaceted character of environmental anticipation across the ages.