Ecology & Collaboration: An Introduction

Journal of Ecohumanism is an international peer-reviewed journal of scholars, researchers, and students who investigate ecohumanist and civil narratives in the fields of Environmental Humanities, Citizen Humanities, Literary Theory and Cultural Criticism, enabling short accounts of research, debates, study cases, book reviews in this interdisciplinary field of Humanities. The Journal seeks to explore issues beyond the "ecocentric-anthropocentric" binary and to examine the changing status of subjectivity, agency, and citizenship today through the complex relations between nature and techno-culture while encouraging a philosophical rethinking of citizenship in a more-than-human world. Journal of Ecohumanism is currently under review by various indexing and abstracting services.

M/C Journal, 2012

Ecology has emerged as one of the most important sites of political struggle today. This issue of M/C invited authors to engage with “ecology” not as a siloised field of scientific enquiry, but rather as a way of contemporary thinking and a conceptual mode that emphasizes connectivity, conviviality, and inter-dependence. Proposing a radical revision of anthropocentrism in When Species Meet, Donna Haraway emphasises the dynamism of ecology as an entangled mesh, observing that, “the world is a knot in motion.” The “infolding” of human bodies with what we call “the environment” has never been clearer than the present moment—a time where humans may have undermined the viability of their own and other organism’s life on Earth. This impending ecological crisis has forced awareness of humanity’s dependence on the nonhuman lives that surround and envelop us. Gregory Bateson reminds us of the gravity of this mutuality with his assertion that the unit of survival is the organism-and-its-envir...

The anthropocene review, 2013

Human activities now play a major, integral and ever-increasing role in the functioning of the Earth System. This fact lies at the heart of the notion of the Anthropocene. Documenting, understanding and responding to the present and future challenges posed by the recent, dramatic changes in the relationship between humans and their environment thus becomes an imperative for human society. This editorial presents the rationale for engaging with the Anthropocene across a wide range of disciplines from engineering and environmental science to the social sciences and humanities. This essentially transdisciplinary engagement requires the establishment of a new journal, The Anthropocene Review, the scope of which is outlined in this editorial.

La Deleuziana, 2016

It is somewhat ironic that just when scholars seem to be reaching an academic consensus critiquing the human exceptionalism of modern humanism, and to be replacing such an exceptionalism with a contextual and processual understanding of the human species, we are suddenly told that we are living in a new geological era named The Anthropocene. Just when we had begun to overthrow such anthropic tendencies in philosophy and the social sciences, we are faced with the undeniable presence of the human in the entire ecosystem , from deet-resistant mosquitoes to the ozone hole in the heavens. If humanism understood the role of the human as exceptional in the positive sense of enacting progressive transformation on the world as defined by the Enlightenment, the centrality of the human in the Anthropocene lies in a different and regressive transformation, not of the cultural world but of the geological earth, in what is an unprecedented ecological decline. Such a dissolution of the nature/culture divide is thus also a dissolution of the disciplinary divide between natural and human sciences, since moral issues can no longer be separated from biological concerns, and politics can no longer be separated from nature. To resolve the Anthropocene will thus require the collaboration of scholars from many different disciplines addressing both scale and value, for though we must measure the ozone and the acidification of the oceans, we must also revise the ecological soundness of our political and economic practices and ideologies, establish a new understanding of the collective co-determination of human and other forms of life, and educate our species about its newfound responsibilities for both the human world and the nonhuman earth. Yet notwithstanding widespread recognition of the dissolution of the nature/culture divide that is intrinsic to Anthropocene discourse, there is considerable disagreement about when and how such a divide came about, and the role this divide plays as cause and/or effect of the Anthropocene. The scientific discourse claims that prior to the Anthropocene, human niche culture in the Holocene did not interfere in any significant way with natural processes, which were independent of human society. Actor-Network Theory and many social scientists claim on the other hand that the nature/culture divide has never existed, and that it was simply a short-lived invention of modernity to set an active subject against a passive world to be exploited. Yet other social scientists disagree with both of these positions, and claim that not only has the distinction between nature and culture always existed, but it continues to exist in the Anthropocene, requiring social scientific rather than scientific expertise in order to come to terms with its political and economic causes. For these scholars, the Anthropocene term is itself misleading for its universalizing of homo sapiens as responsible for the geological shift. What are we to make of these conflicting interpretations of the nature/culture divide, and how might they influence our understanding of the Anthropocene, and of possible responses to it? With such contradictory interpretations, the Anthropocene has come to represent the node in a theory debate with important consequences for understanding who we are and how to respond to the crisis and envision our future on the planet earth. This paper will seek to disentangle these different positions, and evaluate the solutions each position provides to ensure a future for life on the planet. If the scientific position reduces nature to a garden that must be managed by technology to allow for neoliberal lifestyles to continue and Actor-Network Theory reduces human agency to a material force no different from that of technological tools and thereby justifies a form of technological determinism where might makes right, the political positions either call for the demolition of capitalism and with it the nature/culture divide it created, or for the rehabilitation of the nature/culture divide that was destroyed by scientific determinism in order for a social critique of the Anthropocene to be possible at all. Though each position helps us to understand the stakes of the Anthropocene, none are able to develop a politics of nature that interprets the dissolution of the nature/culture divide in such a way as to imagine a polis shared by human and non-human actors. Instead of reducing such politics to a play of material forces or to the human management of the non-human world, such a shared polis requires a transversal ecology capable of rehabilitating solidarity and communication between human and non-human actors. The ecosophy developed by philosopher and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari will be proposed as just such a transversal solution, since it develops a mental, social and environmental ecology that is able to incorporate the perspectives of human and non-human subjects into a shared politics of nature.

Human activities now play a major, integral and ever-increasing role in the functioning of the Earth System. This fact lies at the heart of the notion of the Anthropocene. Documenting, understanding and responding to the present and future challenges posed by the recent, dramatic changes in the relationship between humans and their environment thus becomes an imperative for human society. This editorial presents the rationale for engaging with the Anthropocene across a wide range of disciplines from engineering and environmental science to the social sciences and humanities. This essentially transdisciplinary engagement requires the establishment of a new journal, The Anthropocene Review, the scope of which is outlined in this editorial.

Environmental Ethics, 2018

In Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene, editors Serpil Oppermann and Serenella Iovino have assembled 19 essays and interventions by some of the most distinguished names in a now 'multisperspectival' (xi) research field, from Greta Gaard to Wendy Wheeler and Kate Rigby, all focused on finding 'more critical and imaginative tools to comprehend the Anthropocene' (13). The challenge faced by the collection's contributors is elegantly summarised by Richard Kerridge in his Foreword (xiii-xvii). 'Even as the Anthropocene challenges uscollective humanityto take greater and more exceptional responsibility,' he writes, 'it also admonishes us for past hubris, and relegates us to the category of stumbling, floundering creatures whose plans go awry because we understand too little: in other words, natural creatures, caught up in forces beyond our understanding' (xv). Not the least difficulty is, therefore, one of finding a narrative or narratives that might contain the multitudes denoted by Kerridge's reference to 'collective humanity'. In fact, and as Kerridge also points out, 'some of the contributors to the collection reject the term "Anthropocene"' precisely because it assumes a 'unitary Anthropos' (xvi). From a 'feminist, postcolonial or more broadly Environmental Justice perspective' (xvii), humans are not all equally responsible for 'environmental disasters' (xv), nor equally able to rise to the challenge those disasters present. Moreover, and as the material turn has underlined, humankind is entangled with the morethan-human in ways that emphasize the extent to which both 'are continuously engaged in the production and modification of the system and thus of each other' (xvi). If this inevitably suggests a 'rich array' of different perspectives, as Oppermann and Iovino point out in their own Introduction (1-22), those perspectives are nevertheless brought together by a strong and shared sense of the urgency of 'current ecological crises' (1) created by and 'within systems of massive exploitation of limited natural capital' (2). Arguably, the Environmental Humanities are united within a 'ethical-educational project of creating alliances between science, society, and cultural discourses' (3): '[t]he pivotal question here is: how will new modes of knowing and being, which the Environmental Humanities call for, enable environmentally just practices?' (2). Divided into four parts, the collection turns first to the challenge of 'Re-mapping the Humanities (23-112). In the opening chapter, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen asks if 'word' and 'world' are really as passive as the term Anthropocene implies (25). Instead, he shifts the emphasis towards a 'posthuman environs' (the chapter title) built around 'eco-sonorous terms' (27) that highlight the way that matter inscribes humans, 'regardless of the epochs we declare' (25). In 'Environmental History between Institutionalization and Revolution', Marco Armiero engages with a different aspect of anthropocentrism, the '"human-centric" discipline' of history (45), and the tension between its (potentially revolutionary) transformation and its absorption into the mainstream (45), wryly concluding 'I would prefer to ignore the academic Winter Palace and Occupy reality!' (57). Next, Hubert Zapf explores the challenge of interdisciplinarity through a chapter on 'Cultural Ecology, the Environmental Humanities, and the Transdisciplinary Knowledge of Literature', focusing on some of the ways in which literary knowledge might already offer forms of 'transdisciplinary GREEN LETTERS: STUDIES IN ECOCRITICISM

Journal of Political Ecology, 2013

Connotations - A Journal for Critical Debate, 2019

If the Environmental Humanities (EH) matter, an essential concern is whether we can speak of the possibility of a philosopher of literary and ecological identity. This paper discusses the intersection points of the Environmental Humanities to the wider scientific debate. It suggests that the EH are suited to help construct knowledge for sustainable futures. The arrival of the Anthropocene provides opportunities to cross disciplinary boundaries. Ecocriticism investigates the complex and contradictory relationship between humans and the environment in literature. Ideas of citizenship allow space for conversation about civic responsibility and stewardship. Animal studies intervenes deeply across the humanities, which acknowledges the interspecies imaginary. Future techno-scientific developments make us reconsider distinctions between humans, animals, and machines. The concept of the posthuman emphasizes how profound changes will be for all species. Serious questions might best be answered by environmental philosophy, which articulates the impact of the environment on humans. New Materialism explains why matter matters, and has clear implications for the study of the environment. Work in postcolonial and digital media provides a platform to challenge geographic borders as well as reconsider national contexts. Essentially, this paper asserts that the EH is building critical mass, and functions as a lightning rod between the arts and sciences. Such a development has profound consequences for the future of literary studies.

2015

Nature is one of those ever-present yet somewhat uncomfortable words that structure our everyday lives. In the twenty-first century it is becoming increasingly apparent that whether we consciously address it or not, human cultures and societies are entangled with nature and vice versa. Entanglement is a useful concept here, insofar as unlike terms such as interconnection, it suggests that these terms cannot be considered in isolation from one another. Recognition of this state of affairs has given rise to a new language of the Anthropocene: a new era of history that recognises the ability of humans to intervene and alter the non-human world. However, even as recognition of climate change and man-made extinction become commonplace, and concepts such as sustainability and resilience enter into the conversations of state and corporate actors, it remains unclear how those ideas might speak to our everyday practices and behaviour. In this symposium, we seek to explore what it might mean to conceive of this environmental entanglement in terms of ‘working with nature.’ Are there more or less preferable ways of working with nature? What forms might this work take and how do we distinguish between them? Is the idea of ‘nature’ even sufficient to approach such questions, or do we need to reconsider such a question in terms of environments, ecologies or the broad notion of the non-human world? With a mind to bringing together a range of contributors and stake-holders from across the tertiary sector and the wider community, this symposium seeks to examine how such questions might help us understand and assess the different ways in which humans transform, engage and interact with the nonhuman world. On a global scale, we are witnessing an increasing concern with the different ways in which human behaviour works to shape nature. From climate change to drives towards sustainable communities and ongoing concerns with waste and pollution, the interaction between human and non-human worlds looks set to be a central concern of the twenty-first century. Such concerns have particular resonance in Aotearoa-New Zealand, where there is a long history of direct and directed human interaction with nature: from the introduction of flora and fauna by European colonists, to contemporary efforts to conserve and re-establish threatened ecosystems and, just as importantly, to the role of farming and other primary industries as cornerstones of the national economy and culture. We welcome submissions that engage with human-non-human interactions in any number of theoretical, scientific, ecological, sociological, anthropological, textual, historical, political, ethical, or other methods. We would especially like to encourage submissions from artists and activists whose practices converge with notions of the environment and nature.