This book provides a systematic, interdisciplinary analysis of the conflicts, issues and tensions associated with today’s ecological transformation processes from an environmental humanities perspective. Of interest to researchers, academics and students studying environmental humanities, the social sciences and environment sciences.
This book provides a systematic, interdisciplinary analysis of the conflicts, issues and tensions associated with today’s ecological transformation processes from an environmental humanities perspective. It explores the notion of ecological ambivalence, where conflicting reactions, beliefs, or feelings towards public policies or private practices for ‘saving planet Earth’ threaten to produce a stalemate.
Under the umbrella of the environmental humanities, the book brings together scholars from fields such as environmental history, ecological economics, human geography, and ecocriticism. Contributions investigate the dissonances, or ambivalences, wound up with processes of environmental transformation both conceptually and empirically. Case studies range from wind farms in India to green mineral mines in Mexico, and from chemical contamination in Denmark to Rocky Mountain Arsenal in Denver, USA. Additionally, with a focus on creative environmental communication - as in Philippe Squarzoni’s graphic novel Climate Changed or G’Ebinyo Ogbowei’s poetry - contributions also present possible pathways for overcoming ambivalences, managing them creatively, or critiquing the concept as whole. The volume highlights how the humanities, the arts, and the social sciences can work together to help humanity develop and cultivate the skills to overcome paralysis and engage in practical action, and in doing so, puts forth ambivalence as an approach for being in today’s world.
This book will be of interest to researchers, academics and students studying environmental humanities, the social sciences and environment sciences. It will also be useful for decision makers, think tanks, NGOs and activists.
Introduction Part 1: Conceptual Facets
1. Ecological Transformation and
the Implications of Spatial Scale
2. Climate Solidarity, Time, and
Ambivalence: On a New Term and Its Historical Legacy
3. Transformation and/of
Colonial Tropes. Latin American Narrative Palimpsests
4. Interactions of
Efficiency, Consistency, and Sufficiency across Levels: Assessing Innovation
Tensions through the Lens of Paradox Theory
5. Toxic Commons and the Politics
of Ambivalence: Re-imagining Toxic Legacy Sites Part 2: Ambivalences in
Practice
6. In Praise of Ambivalence: Reflections on Experiences of Pollution
and Remediation
7. Global Waste: On the Ambivalence of Wealth, Health, and
Contradictory Development Models
8. Farming the Wind: Aeolian Politics and
the Sacred Desertscapes (Orans) of Rajasthan
9. Global South Ambivalences of
Transformation? Literature, Extractive Capitalism, and Literary Militancy in
West Africa
10. Mining for a Low-Carbon Economy? Articulations by the Mexican
Corporate Sector
11. Integrating Labor, Environment, and Climate?
(Dis)connections in the Spanish and Portuguese Energy Decarbonizations
12.
Bioplastics Versus Conventional Plastics: An Analysis from a Sociological,
Ethical, and Educational Perspective
13. Against all Odds: Managing
Ambivalence in Philippe Squarzonis Graphic Novel Climate Changed Concluding
Remarks and Survey of the Contributions
Simone M. Müller is DFG Heisenberg Professor of Global Environmental History and Environmental Humanities at the University of Augsburg, Germany.
Matthias Schmidt is Professor of Human Geography and Transformation Research at the University of Augsburg, Germany.
Kirsten Twelbeck is an American Studies scholar and coordinates the international doctoral program ReThinking Environment, a cooperation between the University of Augsburg and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany.
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