Results by title

99 books match the query 'Environment' and 6 start with i

cover of In Search of an Alternative Biopolitics: Anti-Bullfighting, Animality, and the Environment in Contemporary Spain

In Search of an Alternative Biopolitics

Anti-Bullfighting, Animality, and the Environment in Contemporary Spain

Katarzyna Olga Beilin

The Ohio State University Press, 2015

In Search of an Alternative Biopolitics: Anti-Bullfighting, Animality, and the Environment in Contemporary Spain by Katarzyna Olga Beilin takes readers on a journey through the history of alternative thought that challenges mainstream understandings of the relations between the human and nonhuman realms. Weaving through the works of Mariano José de Larra, Eugenio Noel, Luis Buñuel, Luis Martín-Santos, Pedro Almodóvar, Pablo Bérguer, Juan Mayorga, and Rosa Montero, Beilin convincingly demonstrates that “the question of the animal” has long been of particular significance for Spanish culture.

Analyses of the synergy of press debates on bullfighting and the War on Terror, as well as media debates on King Juan Carlos’s hunt in Botswana and his resignation, reveal how the concepts structuring human/animal relations condition national biopolitics. Beilin traces a main principle, where sacrifice of some lives is deemed necessary for the sake of others, from bullfighting, through environmental destruction and immigration policies, to bioeconomy. Ultimately, In Search of an Alternative Biopolitics argues that to address ever-increasing threats of global warming and future catastrophes, we urgently need to redefine concepts structuring the human and the nonhuman realms.
[more]
cover of In The Nature Of Things: Language, Politics, and the Environment

In The Nature Of Things

Language, Politics, and the Environment

Jane Bennett

University of Minnesota Press, 1993

Informed by recent developments in literary criticism and social theory, In the Nature of Things addresses the presumption that nature exists independent of culture and, in particular, of language. The theoretical approaches of the contributors represent both modernist and postmodernist positions, including feminist theory, critical theory, Marxism, science fiction, theology, and botany. They demonstrate how the concept of nature is invoked and constituted in a wide range of cultural projects—from the Bible to science fiction movies, from hunting to green consumerism. Ultimately, it weeks to link the work of theorists concerned with nature and the environment to nontheorists who share similar concerns.

Contributors include R. McGreggor Cawley, Romand Coles, William E. Connolly, Jan E. Dizard, Valerie Hartouni, Cheri Lucas Jennings, Bruce H. Jennings, Timothy W. Luke, Shane Phelan, John Rodman, Michael J. Shapiro, and Wade Sikorski.
[more]
cover of In the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon: Happiness, History, and Environment in a Changing Bhutan

In the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon

Happiness, History, and Environment in a Changing Bhutan

Betsy Bolton

Lever Press, 2025

Landlocked, mountainous, and surrounded by global giants India and China, Bhutan has provided remarkable leadership on both climate action and human happiness, despite its pre-2023 status as a least-developed nation. Bhutan was the first country to be internationally recognized as carbon neutral; it is also the birthplace of “Gross National Happiness” (GNH), a pointed alternative to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a means of measuring the success of national policies in promoting citizens’ wellbeing. Yet Bhutan has also been a site of ethnic conflict, with roughly tens of thousands people displaced into refugee camps in the 1990s and eventually resettled abroad. 

International views on Bhutan tend to be sharply split between admiration for its democratizing development strategies and opposition to its human rights abuses—a division partly maintained by Bhutan’s tight limits on immigration and foreign travel within the country. In the first book-length study of its kind, In the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon explores the tensions and contradictions of Bhutan’s rapid political and economic transformation from the perspective of a Fulbright scholar helping start a new master’s program in the remote east of the country. 

Mingling personal narrative with historical context to engage undergraduate students and general readers, In the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon explores Bhutan’s Vajrayana Buddhist heritage and ongoing embrace of tradition alongside development, the country’s newly minted democracy amidst a complicated history of citizenship and belonging, and the challenges the nation faces in a period of increasing globalization. Betsy Bolton further explores Bhutan’s recent events surrounding the 1990s expulsion of the Lhotshampa people and the development of GNH in the early 2000s. From here, Bolton illuminates how these historical narratives and issues have impacted Bhutanese citizens and students through stories gathered at educational and artistic institutions, festivals and community events. In the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon is a fresh, accessible approach to Bhutanese history and will interest general readers as well as scholars of Asia, history, economics, sociology, and environmental studies.
[more]
cover of Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment in Africa and North America

Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment in Africa and North America

David M. Gordon

Ohio University Press, 2012

Indigenous knowledge has become a catchphrase in global struggles for environmental justice. Yet indigenous knowledges are often viewed, incorrectly, as pure and primordial cultural artifacts. This collection draws from African and North American cases to argue that the forms of knowledge identified as “indigenous” resulted from strategies to control environmental resources during and after colonial encounters.

At times indigenous knowledges represented a “middle ground” of intellectual exchanges between colonizers and colonized; elsewhere, indigenous knowledges were defined through conflict and struggle. The authors demonstrate how people claimed that their hybrid forms of knowledge were communal, religious, and traditional, as opposed to individualist, secular, and scientific, which they associated with European colonialism.

Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment offers comparative and transnational insights that disturb romantic views of unchanging indigenous knowledges in harmony with the environment. The result is a book that informs and complicates how indigenous knowledges can and should relate to environmental policy-making.

Contributors: David Bernstein, Derick Fay, Andrew H. Fisher, Karen Flint, David M. Gordon, Paul Kelton, Shepard Krech III, Joshua Reid, Parker Shipton, Lance van Sittert, Jacob Tropp, James L. A. Webb, Jr., Marsha Weisiger

[more]
cover of Indigenous Perspective to Climate and Environment

Indigenous Perspective to Climate and Environment

Darren Parry

University of Utah Press, 2024

The lands and waters of the American West encountered by European colonizers were not “untouched” or “wild” as some have recorded, but rather the result of a broad range of Indigenous land and water management techniques. To assume that western-based scientific knowledge is superior to Indigenous wisdom can be a barrier to meaningful and lasting collaboration. We must work together if we are to heal the land that we have collectively sullied.
[more]
cover of Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthropocene

Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthropocene

Kregg Hetherington, editor

Duke University Press, 2019

Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthropocene explores life in the age of climate change through a series of infrastructural puzzles—sites at which it has become impossible to disentangle the natural from the built environment. With topics ranging from breakwaters built of oysters, underground rivers made by leaky pipes, and architecture gone weedy to neighborhoods partially submerged by rising tides, the contributors explore situations that destabilize the concepts we once relied on to address environmental challenges. They take up the challenge that the Anthropocene poses both to life on the planet and to our social-scientific understanding of it by showing how past conceptions of environment and progress have become unmoored and what this means for how we imagine the future.

Contributors. Nikhil Anand, Andrea Ballestero, Bruce Braun, Ashley Carse, Gastón R. Gordillo, Kregg Hetherington, Casper Bruun Jensen, Joseph Masco, Shaylih Muehlmann, Natasha Myers, Stephanie Wakefield, Austin Zeiderman
[more]