Environmental Studies
Spring| Summer 2019
Cover image forthcoming
Earth Emotions
New Words for a New World Glenn A. Albrecht May 2019 272pp 9781501715228 £15.99 PB CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS
As climate change and development pressures overwhelm the environment, our emotional relationships with Earth are also in crisis. Pessimism and distress are overwhelming people the world over. In this maelstrom of emotion, solastalgia, the homesickness you have when you are still at home, has become, writes Glenn A. Albrecht, one of the defining emotions of the 21st century. Earth Emotions examines our positive and negative Earth emotions. It explains the author's concept of solastalgia and other well-known ecoemotions such as biophilia and topophilia. Albrecht introduces us to the many new words needed to describe the full range of our emotional responses to the emergent state of the world. We need this creation of a hopeful vocabulary of positive emotions, argues Albrecht, so that we can extract ourselves out of environmental desolation and reignite our millennia-old biophilia—love of life—for our home planet. To do so, he proposes a dramatic change from the current human-dominated Anthropocene era to one that will be founded, materially, ethically, politically, and spiritually on the revolution in thinking being delivered by contemporary symbiotic science.
Living with Oil and Coal
Resource Politics and Militarization in Northeast India Dolly Kikon Series edited by K. Sivaramakrishnan
April 2019 200pp 13 b&w illus., 2 maps 9780295743950 £23.99 PB 9780295745039 £79.00 HB UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS
The 19th-century discovery of oil in the eastern Himalayan foothills, together with the establishment of tea plantations and other extractive industries, continues to have a profound impact on life in the region. In the Indian states of Assam and Nagaland, everyday militarization, violence, and the scramble for natural resources regulate the lives of Naga, Ahom, and Adivasi people, as well as migrants from elsewhere in the region, as they struggle to find peace and work. Anthropologist Dolly Kikon uses indepth ethnographic accounts to address the complexity of Northeast India, a region between Southeast Asia and China where boundaries and borders are made, disputed, and maintained. Bringing a fresh and exciting direction to borderland studies, she explores the social bonds established through practices of resource extraction and the tensions these relations generate, focusing on peoples’ love for the landscape and for the state, as well as for family, friends, and neighbors.
Reoccupy Earth
Spaceship in the Desert
Groundworks: Ecological Issues in Philosophy and Theology April 2019 240pp 9780823283538 £21.99 PB 9780823283545 £79.00 HB
Experimental Futures March 2019 272pp 31 illus. 9781478000914 £20.99 PB 9781478000723 £83.00 HB
Notes toward an Other Beginning David Wood
FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS
Habit rules our lives. And yet climate change and the catastrophic future it portends make it clear that we cannot go on like this. Our habits are integral to narratives of the good life, to social norms and expectations, as well as to economic reality. Such shared shapes are vital. Yet while many of our individual habits seem perfectly reasonable, when aggregated they spell disaster. Beyond consumerism, other forms of life and patterns of dwelling are clearly possible. But how can we get there from here? Who precisely is the “we” that our habits have created, and who else might we be? Philosophy is about emancipation— from illusions, myths, and oppression. In Reoccupy Earth, the noted philosopher David Wood shows how an approach to philosophy attuned to our ecological existence can suspend the taken-for-granted and open up alternative forms of earthly dwelling. Sharing the Earth, as we do, raises fundamental questions about space and time, place and history, territory and embodiment—questions that philosophy cannot directly answer but can help us to frame and to work out for ourselves.
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Energy, Climate Change, and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi Gökçe Günel
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
In 2006 Abu Dhabi launched an ambitious project to construct the world’s first zero-carbon city: Masdar City. In Spaceship in the Desert Gökçe Günel examines the development and construction of Masdar City's renewable energy and clean technology infrastructures, providing an illuminating portrait of an international group of engineers, designers, and students who attempted to build a post-oil future in Abu Dhabi. While many of Masdar's initiatives—such as developing a new energy currency and a driverless rapid transit network—have stalled or not met expectations, Günel analyzes how these initiatives contributed to rendering the future a thinly disguised version of the fossil-fueled present. Spaceship in the Desert tells the story of Masdar, at once a “utopia” sponsored by the Emirati government, and a well-resourced company involving different actors who participated in the project, each with their own agendas and desires.