This is a collection of essays about the media, the environment, and the whole of humanity at the brink of extinction. As the demands of overpopulation and of an unsustainable consumer economy dry up existing natural resources and destroy vital ecosystems that we need to survive, the corporate-controlled media saturate worldwide audiences with a barrage of hypnotic images and narratives to stimulate over-consumption and to distract us from the consequences of rampant consumerism, while remaining silent about the systematic destruction of the environment and our future. Academicians from the across the sciences, the social sciences, the arts, and the humanities engage in an interdisciplinary discussion informed by a vision of an interconnected humanity and focused on the role of the media in forging public discourse. Contributors to the collection argue that today’s media are failing humanity. Rather than providing pictures of reality on which the world’s citizens can act, the corporate-controlled media are widely used as instruments of commercial and political propaganda, creating an immense web of images and narratives that their creators know to be not true–-fabrications designed to sell, to manipulate, in a sense to enslave worldwide audiences. At the core of the discussion in this book is a utopian vision of one unified humanity—billions of people whose destinies and dreams are imbricated and interdependent, and who share the same world, the same habitats. It is a vision of a world that cherishes diversity but is also united—a world where our differences are no longer a cause for conflict and where separate countries or separate ethnic or religious communities no longer have to compete or wage war to exploit available resources. As extensions of humans, the media can be instruments of salvation instead of destruction, liberation instead of oppression. But first, we must recognize the challenges we face.

Throughout the centuries philosophers and poets alike have defended an essential difference—rather than a porous transition—between the human and animal. Attempts to assign essential properties to humans (e.g., language, reason, or morality) often reflected ulterior aims to defend a privileged position for humans.. This book shifts the traditional anthropocentric focus of philosophy and literature by combining the questions “What is human?” and “What is animal?” What makes this collection unique is that it fills a lacuna in critical animal studies and the growing field of ecocriticism. It is the first collection that establishes a productive encounter between philosophical perspectives on the human–animal boundary and those that draw on fictional literature. The objective is to establish a dialogue between those disciplines with the goal of expanding the imaginative scope of human-animal relationships. The contributions thus do not only trace and deconstruct the boundaries dividing humans and nonhuman animals, they also present the reader with alternative perspectives on the porous continuum and surprising reversal of what appears as human and what as nonhuman.

In Environmental Legacies of the Copernican Universe, Jean-Marie Kauth shows how counter-ecological metaphors sprung from the cosmology of the Copernican Revolution influence us still in unexpected, maladaptive ways, nurturing conceptions of the world that are not only incorrect but enabling of ecocide. She argues that grasping these underlying paradigms may help us to alter our thinking and make the radical transformations needed to counter the forward motion of our capitalist, post-industrial society.

This book is a collection of essays about the interaction between God, humans, and nature in the context of the environmental challenges and Biblical studies. Chapters include topics on creation care and Sabbath, sacramental approaches to earth care, classical and medieval cosmologies, ecotheodicy, how we understand the problem of nonhuman suffering in a world controlled by a good God, ecojustice, and how humans help to alleviate nonhuman suffering. The book seeks to provide a way to understand Judeo-Christian perspectives on human-to-nonhuman interaction through Biblical, literary, cultural, film, and music studies, and as such, offers an interdisciplinary approach with emphasis on the humanities, which provides a broader platform for ecotheology.

Why do we find so many references to nature and the environment in the many Caribbean literary texts that try to come to terms with the contemporary age of globalization? Even when these novels and poems do not seem to be concerned with environmental issues at all, they abound with fragrant, creepy or dark references to flowers, insects, trees, gardens, and mud. This book discusses a range of Anglophone and Dutch-language Caribbean literary texts to propose an answer. It shows that some writers evoke nature to question oppressive notions of what is natural, and what is not, when it comes to race, gender, and desire. Other writers choose to counter the destructive dichotomies of wildness/order, nature/culture, nature/human that marked colonialism. Instead, they represent the environment as a field of interconnectedness, marked by intense semiotic interaction, in which human beings are also implicated. But writing about nature can also be a means to reconnect with the very foundations of life itself. In the most dramatic cases, references to nature evoke an extra-discursive space that then functions to subvert existing discourses. That space may even mark the site of the annihilation of discourse, or of the self. These texts suggest that, in times of globalization, it is only the dark, queer turn to matter that will free the path to imagining human existence in a new way. The book’s proposal to understand some of these fascinating texts as an effort to relate to the mind-baffling, explosive real is inspired by postcolonial trauma theory, posthumanism, and new materialism. However, Caribbean literature is a layered practice, that does much more than merely explore the world’s materiality. It works simultaneously as cultural critique, counter-discourse, and as the manipulation of affect. This book therefore brings together ecocriticism with Caribbean and postcolonial studies, the study of globalization, trauma theory, the study of gender and sexuality, posthumanism and new materialism, to bring out the full complexity of these wise texts. Thus, it hopes to show its readers their extraordinary innovative potential.

Concentrating on a powerful, emerging genre, Tatiana Konrad’s Climate Change Fiction and Ecocultural Crisis provides a survey of popular narratives that further our understanding of climate change in contemporary fiction. Konrad advocates for the expansion and redefinition of the cli-fi genre and argues that industrial fiction from the nineteenth century is the first example of climate change fiction. Tracing the ways through which cli-fi outlines a history of our modern ecocultural crisis, this book demonstrates how the genre employs four major thematic clusters to achieve this narrative: weather, science, religion, and place. Focusing on a diverse range of issues, including fossil fuels, cheap energy, the intricacies of human–more-than-human relationships, and postcolonial geographies, Konrad illustrates how cli-fi transcends mere storytelling. The genre ultimately emerges as an important means to forecast, imagine, and contemplate climatic events. The book invites a broadening of the environmental humanities discourse, asking readers not only to deepen their understanding of the current climate crisis, but also to consider how cli-fi culture can be viewed as an effective method to address climate change.

T. S. Eliot enjoyed a profound relationship with Earth. Criticism of his work does not suggest that this exists in his poetic oeuvre. Writing into this gap, Etienne Terblanche demonstrates that Eliot presents Earth as a process in which humans immerse themselves. The Waste Land and Four Quartets in particular re-locate the modern reader towards mindfulness of Earth’s continuation and one’s radical becoming within that process. But what are the potential implications for ecocriticism? Based on its careful reading of the poems from a new material perspective, this book shows how vital it has become for ecocriticism to be skeptical about the extent of its skepticism, to follow instead the twentieth century’s most important poet who, at the end of searing skepticism, finds affirmation of Earth, art, and real presence.

Ecocriticism is a mode of interdisciplinary critical inquiry into the relationship between cultural production, society, and the environment. The field advocates for the more-than-human realm as well as for underprivileged human and non-human groups and their perspectives. Taiwan is one of the earliest centers for promoting ecocriticism outside the West and has continued to play a central role in shaping ecocriticism in East Asia. This is the first English anthology dedicated to the vibrant development of ecocriticism in Taiwan. It provides a window to Taiwan’s important contributions to international ecocriticism, especially an emerging “vernacular” trend in the field emphasizing the significance of local perspectives and styles, including non-western vocabularies, aesthetics, cosmologies, and political ideologies. Taiwan's unique history, geographic location, geology, and subtropical climate generate locale-specific, vernacular thinking about island ecology and environmental history, as well as global environmental issues such as climate change, dioxin pollution, species extinction, energy decisions, pollution, and environmental injustice. In hindsight, Taiwan's industrial modernization no longer appears as a success narrative among Asia's “Four Little Dragons,” but as a cautionary tale revealing the brute force entrepreneurial exploitation of the land and the people. In this light, this volume can be seen as a critical response to Taiwan's postcolonial, capitalist-industrial modernity, as manifested in the scholars’ readings of Taiwan's "mountain and river," ocean, animal, and aboriginal (non)fictional narratives, environmental documentaries, and art installations. This volume is endowed with a mixture of ecocosmopolitan and indigenous sensitivities. Though dominated by the Han Chinese ethnic group and its Confucian ideology, Taiwan is a place of complicated ethnic identities and affiliations. The succession of changing colonial and political regimes, made even more complex by the island’s sixteen aboriginal groups and several diasporic subcultures (South Asian immigrants, Western expatriates, and diverse immigrants from the Chinese mainland), has led to an ongoing quest for political and cultural identity. This complexity urges Taiwan-based ecoscholars to pay attention to the diasporic, comparative, and intercultural dimensions of local specificity, either based on their own diasporic experience or the cosmopolitan features of the Taiwanese texts they scrutinize. This cosmopolitan-vernacular dynamic is a key contribution Taiwan has to offer current ecocritical scholarship.

Where now for postcolonial studies? That is the central question in this new volume from one of the field’s most original thinkers. Not so long ago, the driving force behind postcolonial criticism was literary; increasingly, however, many have claimed that the future of postcolonial studies is interdisciplinary. Interdisciplinary Measures thoroughly considers this alternative trajectory through the field of postcolonial studies by setting up a series of conversations among these newly postcolonial disciplines—notably geography, environmental studies, history, and anthropology—and literary studies in which the imaginative possibilities of non-Western epistemologies are brought to the fore.

Literary geographies is an exciting new area of interdisciplinary research. Innovative and engaging, this book applies theories of landscape, space and place from the discipline of cultural geography within an early modern historical context. Different kinds of drama and performance are analysed: from commercial drama by key playwrights to household masques and entertainment performed by families and in semi-official contexts. Sanders provides a fresh look at works from the careers of Ben Jonson, John Milton and Richard Brome, paying attention to geographical spaces and habitats like forests, coastlines and arctic landscapes of ice and snow, as well as the more familiar locales of early modern country estates and city streets and spaces. Overall, the book encourages readers to think about geography as kinetic, embodied and physical, not least in its literary configurations, presenting a key contribution to early modern scholarship.