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• Shadow
• House
• Wood and stone
• Reciprocity
• Depth
• Mind
• Mood
• The speech of things
• The discourse of the birds
• Sleight-of-hand
• Shapeshifting
• The real in its wonder
• Conclusion : at the heart of the heart of the world.

A startling exploration of our human entanglement with the rest of nature. As the climate veers toward catastrophe, the innumerable losses cascading through the biosphere make vividly evident the need for a metamorphosis in our relation to the living land. For too long we've inured ourselves to the wild intelligence of our flesh, taking our primary truths from technologies that hold the living world at a distance. This book subverts that distance, drawing readers ever deeper into their animal senses in order to explore, from within, the elemental kinship between the body and the breathing Earth. Abram shows that from the awakened perspective of the human animal, awareness (or mind) is not an exclusive possession of our species but a lucid quality of the biosphere itself--a quality in which we, along with the oaks and the spiders, steadily participate.--From publisher description.

• Welcome to the Anthropocene. Apps for apes ; Wild heart, anthropocene mind ; Black marble ; Handmade landscapes ; A dialect of stone ; Monkeying with the weather ; Gaia in a temper ; Brainstorming from equator to ice ; Blue revolution
• In the house of stone and light. Asphalt jungles ; A green man in a green shade ; House plants? How passé ; Opportunity warms
• Is nature "natural" anymore? Is nature "natural" anymore? ; The slow-motion invaders ;"They had no choice" ; Paddling in the gene pool ; For love of a snail
• Nature, pixilated. An (un)natural future of the senses ; Weighing in the nanoscale ; Nature, pixilated ; The interspecies Internet ; Your passion flower is sexting you ; When robots weep, who will comfort them? ; Robots on a date ; Printing a rocking horse on Mars
• Our bodies, our nature. The (3D-printed) ear he lends me ; Cyborgs and chimeras ; DNA's secret doormen ; Meet my maker, the mad molecule ; Wild heart, anthropocene mind (revisited).

"Humans have subdued 75 percent of the land surface, concocted a wizardry of industrial and medical marvels, strung lights all across the darkness. We tinker with nature at every opportunity; we garden the planet with our preferred species of plants and animals, many of them invasive; and we have even altered the climate, threatening our own extinction. Yet we reckon with our own destructive capabilities in extraordinary acts of hope-filled creativity ... Ackerman [explores] our new reality, introducing us to many of the people and ideas now creating--perhaps saving--our future and that of our fellow creatures"--Amazon.com.

• Introductio
• n1. The Works and Arts of Men: Irrigation and Environmen
• t2. Waters Dedicated to Some Purposes: New Infrastructur
• e3. For the Beautification of the City: Christian Urban Refor
• m4. Divine Mercy and Help: Natural Disaster and the Rise of Rogation Procession
• s5. Seeking the Dew of His Grace: Drought
• s6. From Purification to Protection: Plagu
• e7. That for Which the King of Kings Sent the Flood? Floods and LocustsConclusion.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

How did medieval people think about the environments in which they lived? In a world shaped by God, how did they treat environments marked by religious difference? The Keys to Bread and Wine explores the answers to these questions in Valencia in the later Middle Ages. When Christians conquered the city in 1238, it was already one of the richest agricultural areas in the Mediterranean thanks to a network of irrigation canals constructed under Muslim rule. Despite this constructed environment, drought, flooding, plagues, and other natural disasters continued to confront civic leaders in the later medieval period. Abigail Agresta argues that the city's Christian rulers took a technocratic approach to environmental challenges in the fourteenth century but by the mid-fifteenth century relied increasingly on religious ritual, reflecting a dramatic transformation in the city's religious identity. Using the records of Valencia's municipal council, she traces the council's efforts to expand the region's infrastructure in response to natural disasters, while simultaneously rendering the landscape within the city walls more visibly Christian. This having been achieved, Valencia's leaders began by the mid-fifteenth century to privilege rogations and other ritual responses over infrastructure projects. But these appeals to divine aid were less about desperation than confidence in the city's Christianity. Reversing traditional narratives of technological progress, The Keys to Bread and Wine shows how religious concerns shaped the governance of the environment, with far-reaching implications for the environmental and religious history of medieval Iberia.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Preface Acknowledgments Introduction
• 1. A Sumbiography: A Summation of My Green Past
• 2. Solastalgia: The Homesickness You Have at Home
• 3. The Psychoterratic in the Anthropocene: Negative Earth Emotions
• 4. The Psychoterratic in the Symbiocene: Positive Earth Emotions
• 5. Gaia and the Ghedeist: Secular Spirituality
• 6. Generation Symbiocene: Creating the New World Conclusion Glossary of Psychoterratic Terms Notes References Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

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 twenty-first century. Earth Emotions examines our positive and negative Earth emotions. It explains the author's concept of solastalgia and other well-known eco-emotions 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. Albrecht names this period the Symbiocene. With the current and coming generations, "Generation Symbiocene, " Albrecht sees reason for optimism. The battle between the forces of destruction and the forces of creation will be won by Generation Symbiocene, and Earth Emotions presents an ethical and emotional odyssey for that victory.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Traditional societies have much to teach the modern world about conservation and environmental management. The Pursuit of Ecotopia: Lessons from Indigenous and Traditional Societies for the Human Ecology of Our Modern World argues that the root of our environmental crisis is that we have not devised modern ways to induce people with diverse interests to think and act cooperatively to secure shared interests. We take a short-term, narrow view of resource management and ethical conduct instead of a long-term, global view of "ecotopia"-a conception in which the destructive corollaries of consumerism are curbed by emotionally grounded policies and ethics of sustainability, social justice, and stewardship. In this controversial and brilliantly written book, author E. N. Anderson maintains that the world can escape impending ecological disaster only by embracing a political and ethical transformation that will imbue modern societies with the same shared sense of emotional rationality practiced by traditional cultures. He draws lessons from ecologically successful traditional societies-and also draws cautionary tales from traditional societies that have responded maladaptively to disruption and failed ecologically as a result.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Foreword: A river in time
• Introduction: Twelve millennia on the San Juan
• ch. 1, Prehistory: from clovis hunters to corn farmers
• ch. 2, Navajos, Paiutes, and Utes: views of a sacred land
• ch. 3, Exploration and science: defining terra incognita
• ch. 4, Livestock: cows, feed, and floods
• ch. 5, Agriculture: ditches, droughts, and disasters
• ch. 6, City building: farming the triad
• ch. 7, Mining: black and yellow gold in redrock country
• ch. 8, The federal government: dams, tamarisk, and pikeminnows
• ch. 9, San Juan of the imagination: local and national values
• Epilogue: Visions: flowing from the sunrise or a water spigot?

Natural history of the lower San Juan River in the US Southwest.

• TABLE OF CONTENTS Part I: WATER AND REVOLUTIONS. Italian landscape with waterfall A road to waterpower
• 1. The landscape of Political Economy Nature and nation in the Kingdom of Naples Improving the Valley Landscape and violence
• 2. Empire and the 'disorder of water' Liberating nature Rivers and revolution Seeing like a statistician
• 3. The ecology of waterpower The making of an industrial riverscape 'I'll have your flesh for three cents per pound': Gender and mechanisation Improvement vs. habitation The machine in the river: a pastoral narrative PART II: THE ECONOMY OF WATER One hundred years of enclosures Rivers and property in the Italian South
• 4. Enclosing the river Picture a river open to all... The appropriators Water wars, water discipline The tragedy of enclosure
• 5. Floods and politics in the Apennines Seeing like an engineer The un-improving State Industry and disaster EPILOGUE Common Water.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Enclosing Water is an environmental history of the Industrial Revolution, as inscribed on the Liri valley in Italy's Central Apennines. Amid forces of revolution and empire, and Enlightenment discourses of 'improvement' and political economy, the Liri's natural wealth - water-power - generated sweeping changes in its landscape and working and living environments. This book tells the story of how defining water as property - both materially and discursively - led to the emergence of an industrial riverscape, and of a concomitant new ecological consciousness; to heightened environmental risks and awareness of those risks. A dramatic century in the Liri's socio-environmental history, with its cast of new industrial bourgeoisie, engineers and civil servants, illuminates how material developments and ideological currents completely reshaped the relationship between society and nature at the periphery of 19th century Europe. By integrating Political Economy into the narrative of European environmental history, this pioneering book offers a critical new view of discourses of water disorder and environmental politics in the Mediterranean region.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Alter Earth
• Iron rules
• Written in stone
• Terra incognita
• Ground work
• Big death
• The people's epoch
• A better anthropocene
• City folks
• The long thaw
• The final frontier.

With the historical perspective of The Song of the Dodo and the urgency of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, a brilliant young environmental journalist argues that we must innovate and adapt to save planet Earth.Civilization is in crisis, facing disasters of our own making on the only planet known to bear life in the vast void of the universe. We have become unwitting gardeners of the Earth, not in control, but setting the conditions under which all of life flourishes-or not. Truly, it's survival of the innovators. The Unnatural World chronicles a disparate band of unlikely heroes: an effervescent mad scientist who would fertilize the seas; a pigeon obsessive bent on bringing back the extinct; a low-level government functionary in China doing his best to clean up his city, and more. These scientists, billionaires, and ordinary people are all working toward saving the best home humanity is ever likely to have. What is the threat? It is us. In a time when a species dies out every ten minutes, when summers are getting hotter, winters colder, and oceans higher, some people still deny mankind's effect on the Earth. But all of our impacts on the planet have ushered in what qualifies as a new geologic epoch, thanks to global warming, mass extinction, and such technologies as nuclear weapons or plastics. The Unnatural World examines the world we have created and analyzes the glimmers of hope emerging from the efforts of incredible individuals seeking to change our future. Instead of a world without us, this history of the future shows how to become good gardeners, helping people thrive along with an abundance of plants, animals, all the exuberant profusion of life on Earth-a better world with us. The current era of humans need not be the end of the world-it's just the end of the world as we know it.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Acknowledgments Introduction: Nature or 'Nature'? Ecological Politics and the Postmodern Condition
• 1 Ecocentrism and the Defence of Nature
• 2 Postmodernism: The Critique of 'Nature'
• 3 Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Modernity and the Historicization of Alienation
• 4 Karl Marx: Objectification and Alienation under Capitalism
• 5 Theodor W. Adorno: From Udeis to Utopia
• 6 Herbert Marcuse: Basic and Surplus Alienation
• 7 Denaturalizing Ecological Politics Notes Bibliography Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

The possibility of bringing the insights of modern political theory to bear on the problems of human ecology has long been plagued by disagreements over the category of nature itself. But with Denaturalizing Ecological Politics, Andrew Biro has found a way of rescuing environmentalism from the ideological trap of naturalism. Biro develops an environmental political theory that takes seriously both the materiality of the ecological crises generated by industrial and post-industrial society and the anti-foundationalist critiques of 'nature' developed in postmodern social theory. He argues that the theoretical basis for ecological politics can be better advanced through the lens of alienation from nature, sidestepping some of the pitfalls of debates over conceptions of nature itself. Biro traces the development of the concept of alienation from nature through four modern political thinkers - Rousseau, Marx, Adorno, and Marcuse - each of whom are read as arguing that human beings are not biologically separate from the rest of nature, but are nevertheless historically differentiated from it through the self-conscious transformation of the natural environment. In so doing, Biro provides the starting point for a 'denaturalized' rethinking of ecological politics.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Acknowledgments Introduction: Nature or 'Nature'? Ecological Politics and the Postmodern Condition
• 1 Ecocentrism and the Defence of Nature
• 2 Postmodernism: The Critique of 'Nature'
• 3 Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Modernity and the Historicization of Alienation
• 4 Karl Marx: Objectification and Alienation under Capitalism
• 5 Theodor W. Adorno: From Udeis to Utopia
• 6 Herbert Marcuse: Basic and Surplus Alienation
• 7 Denaturalizing Ecological Politics Notes Bibliography Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

The possibility of bringing the insights of modern political theory to bear on the problems of human ecology has long been plagued by disagreements over the category of nature itself. But with Denaturalizing Ecological Politics, Andrew Biro has found a way of rescuing environmentalism from the ideological trap of naturalism. Biro develops an environmental political theory that takes seriously both the materiality of the ecological crises generated by industrial and post-industrial society and the anti-foundationalist critiques of 'nature' developed in postmodern social theory. He argues that the theoretical basis for ecological politics can be better advanced through the lens of alienation from nature, sidestepping some of the pitfalls of debates over conceptions of nature itself. Biro traces the development of the concept of alienation from nature through four modern political thinkers - Rousseau, Marx, Adorno, and Marcuse - each of whom are read as arguing that human beings are not biologically separate from the rest of nature, but are nevertheless historically differentiated from it through the self-conscious transformation of the natural environment. In so doing, Biro provides the starting point for a 'denaturalized' rethinking of ecological politics.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Prologue: The allure of timelessness
• A call for timefulness
• An atlas of time
• The pace of the earth
• Changes in the air
• Great accelerations
• Timefulness, utopian and scientific
• Epilogue
• Appendixes. 1. Simplified geologic timescale ; 2. Durations and rates of earth phenomena ; 3. Environmental crises in earth's history : causes and consequences.

Why an awareness of Earth (TM)s temporal rhythms is critical to our planetary survival Few of us have any conception of the enormous timescales in our planet (TM)s long history, and this narrow perspective underlies many of the environmental problems we are creating for ourselves. The passage of nine days, which is how long a drop of water typically stays in Earth (TM)s atmosphere, is something we can easily grasp. But spans of hundreds of years "the time a molecule of carbon dioxide resides in the atmosphere "approach the limits of our comprehension. Our everyday lives are shaped by processes that vastly predate us, and our habits will in turn have consequences that will outlast us by generations. Timefulness reveals how knowing the rhythms of Earth (TM)s deep past and conceiving of time as a geologist does can give us the perspective we need for a more sustainable future. Marcia Bjornerud shows how geologists chart the planet (TM)s past, explaining how we can determine the pace of solid Earth processes such as mountain building and erosion and comparing them with the more unstable rhythms of the oceans and atmosphere. These overlapping rates of change in the Earth system "some fast, some slow "demand a poly-temporal worldview, one that Bjornerud calls oetimefulness. She explains why timefulness is vital in the Anthropocene, this human epoch of accelerating planetary change, and proposes sensible solutions for building a more time-literate society. This compelling book presents a new way of thinking about our place in time, enabling us to make decisions on multigenerational timescales. The lifespan of Earth may seem unfathomable compared to the brevity of human existence, but this view of time denies our deep roots in Earth (TM)s history "and the magnitude of our effects on the planet.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• List of entries
• Guide to related topics
• Preface
• Introduction
• Entries
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index.

Students today are often confronted with alarms and concerns over the state of the environment. Global warming, biodiversity, genetically engineered food - disputes over such topics are a constant refrain. But to best understand these contemporary debates, students need to understand the long history of these environmental concerns. Great Debates in American Environmental History examines over 200 of the most important and controversial environmental issues in the history of the United States, conveniently organizing them in chronological order from the Colonial period to the present. Each entry describes the issue, the stakeholders of various positions, and both the immediate outcome of the debate, and the long-term consequences of the result. Great Debates in American Environmental History examines in detail the environmental issues surrounding such turning points in the history of the United States as: The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and the resulting addition of the Great Plains to the United States The controversial mid-19th century plans for a large urban park in the middle of Manhattan, now known as Central Park BLThe debates over the federal land grants given to railroads in the 1860s to spur the construction of transcontinental rail, and the resulting environmental effects that impact much of the West today BLThe 1921 discovery of tetraethyl lead as an anti-knock gasoline additive, which was put on the market with little research as to the health impact BLThe current debates over the drilling for oil in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWR Each entry includes all sides of the issue and concludes with a list of resources for further reading.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)
Global warming, biodiversity, genetically engineered food - disputes over such topics are a constant refrain. But to best understand these contemporary debates, students need to understand the long history of these environmental concerns. This reference examines over 150 of the most important and controversial environmental issues, conveniently organizing them in chronological order from the Colonial period to the present. Each entry describes the issue, the stakeholders of various positions, and both the immediate outcome of the debate and the long-term consequences of the result.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Expanding colonial systems
• Variations on the agricultural ideal
• Technology leads the day
• Corridors of trade
• Speaking for nature
• Civil War
• The ethics of extraction
• Factories in the field
• Cities and worker reform
• Prioritizing nature.

Provides an understanding of how people actually lived, based on research.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Resource expansion
• The drive for parks
• Pollution and city life
• Resource management and conservation
• Expansive possibilities : life with the bomb
• Grassroots activism and environmental concern
• Creating a political framework for environmental action
• Green culture
• Going global
• Environmental backlash and growing energy needs
• Epilogue: Sifting through the debris of hurricane Katrina.

Provides in-depth understanding of how people actually lived, based on research.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

This brilliant new book explores how, over the last 250 years, the German people have shaped their natural environment and how the landscapes they created took a powerful hold on the German imagination. It investigates how the most fundamental element - water - was 'conquered' by draining fens and marshes, straightening the courses of rivers, building high dams and exploiting hydro-electric power. The book begins in the 1740s with Frederick the Great of Prussia, who regarded the reclamation of marshland as 'conquests from barbarism'. We meet Johann Gottfried Tulla, 'the man who tamed the wild Rhine' in the nineteenth century. We learn about the construction of the Prussian port of Wilhelmshaven on the Jade Bay, later to become a symbol of the new Germany's naval ambitions. We witness the colonisation of the moors and the triumph of the steamship. We encounter Otto Intze, 'master dambuilder' of the years around 1900, whose modern marvels supplied drinking water to a fast-growing population and provided hydro-electrical power - 'white coal'. But the dark side of this conquest emerged under the Nazis, who set out to colonise 'living space' in the East. Convinced of their superiority over the 'marsh-dwelling Slavs', the Nazi occupiers of Poland embarked on a programme of population transfer and racial engineering. This physical and ethnic reshaping of the east European landscape would result in the murder of millions of Jews and Poles. Race and reclamation went hand in hand. The modern idea of 'mastery'' over nature always had its critics, whether their motives were aesthetic, religious or environmentalist. Germany's defeat in 1945 brought renewed attachment to an idealised natural landscape. This persisted as a conservative reproach through the ensuing 'economic miracle', which caused major problems of pollution and environmental destruction. It was in the 1970s, however, that protecting the environment became a central part of the West German political agenda and soon began to show results. The collapse of the Wall in 1989 then revealed the catastrophic state of the environment in East Germany, a country that had been in thrall to Soviet-style industrialisation. "The Conquest of Nature" is a groundbreaking study that opens new vistas on the history of Germany. It also shows that while mastery over nature delivers undoubted benefits, it has often come at a tremendous cost to both the natural environment and human life.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Acknowledgements History as a Starting Point: Preface to the English Edition
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Deconstructing our Beliefs, (Re)-thinking Nature Chapter 2: Turning Africa into Parkland (1850-1960 Chapter 3: A Special Project for Africa (1960-1965) Chapter 4: The Expert and the Emperor (1965-1970) Chapter 5: Violence Below the Surface of Nature (1970-1978) Chapter 6: The Sustainable Development Trap (1978-1996) Chapter 7: The Fiction of the Community Approach (1996-2009) Chapter 8: The Roots of Injustice (2009-2019) Conclusion
• Looking Ahead: Afterword Notes Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

The story begins with a dream - the dream of Africa. Virgin forests, majestic mountains surrounded by savannas, vast plains punctuated with the rhythms of animal life where lions, elephants and giraffes reign as lords of nature, far from civilization - all of us carry such images in our heads, imagining Africa as a timeless Eden untouched by the ravages of modernity. But this Africa has never existed. The more we destroy nature here, the more we fantasize about it in Africa. Along with UNESCO, the WWF and other organizations, we convince ourselves that the African national parks are protecting the last vestiges of a world once untouched and wild. In reality, argues Guillaume Blanc, these organizations are responsible for naturalizing large tracts of the African continent, turning territories into parks and forcibly evicting thousands of people from the lands where they have lived for centuries. Making use of archives and oral histories, Blanc investigates this battle for a phantom Africa and the contradictory claims of nations who destroy nature at home while believing that they are protecting the natural world abroad. In so doing, they enact a new type of colonialism: green colonialism.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

This environmental history underscores the uneasy balance between conservation and commerce. By using North Carolina's Green Swamp as a case study, Tycho de Boer illustrates the struggle of a rural area trying to preserve its natural environment while encouraging economic growth.De Boer highlights the complex relationship between the swamp, located in the extreme southeast corner of the state, local inhabitants, and outside entrepreneurs. He traces the growth of agriculture and the turpentine and lumber industries from the mid-seventeenth century to the present, and examines their impact, including the destruction of longleaf pine forests.Yet he also reveals how businesses in this region took a leading role in managing the environment. What emerges is an understanding of the complex intersections between nature, business, and community. "Nature, Business, and Community in North Carolina's Green Swamp" is a history of a rare natural environment and its transformation that demonstrates how communal values and practices individuals can mitigate - and often have mitigated - the damage capitalist interests inflict on the world.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Part One. What's in a word? 1. Welcome to the anthropocene ; 2. Thinking with Gaia : towards environmental humanities
• Part Two. Speaking for the earth, guiding humanity : deconstructing the geocratic grand narrative of the anthropocene. 3. Clio, the earth and the anthropocenologists ; 4. Who is the anthropos?
• Part Three. What histories for the anthropocene? 5. Thermocene : a political history of CO₂ ; 6. Thanatocene : power and ecocide ; 7. Phagocene : consuming the planet ; 8. Phronocene : grammars of environmental reflexivity ; 9. Agnotocene : externalizing nature, economizing the world ; 10. Capitalocene : a combined history of earth system and world-systems ; 11. Polemocene : resisting the deterioration of the earth since 1750
• Conclusion: Surviving and living the anthropocene

Scientists tell us that the Earth has entered a new epoch: the Anthropocene. We are not facing simply an environmental crisis, but a geological revolution of human origin. In two centuries, our planet has tipped into a state unknown for millions of years. How did we get to this point? Refuting the convenient view of a "human species" that upset the Earth system unaware of what it was doing, this book proposes a new account of modernity that shakes up many accepted ideas: on the supposedly recent date of "environmental awareness, " on previous challenges to industrialism, on the manufacture of consumerism and the energy "transition, " as well as on the role of the military in environmental destruction. Through a dialogue between science and history, the authors draw an ecological balance-sheet of a developmental model that has become unsustainable, and explore paths for living and acting politically in the Anthropocene.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)