Material Ecocriticism

Material Ecocriticism PDF Author: Serenella Iovino
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 025301400X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
Material Ecocriticism offers new ways to analyze language and reality, human and nonhuman life, mind and matter, without falling into well-worn paths of thinking. Bringing ecocriticism closer to the material turn, the contributions to this landmark volume focus on material forces and substances, the agency of things, processes, narratives and stories, and making meaning out of the world. This broad-ranging reflection on contemporary human experience and expression provokes new understandings of the planet to which we are intimately connected.

Material Ecocriticism

Material Ecocriticism PDF Author: Serenella Iovino
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 025301400X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
Material Ecocriticism offers new ways to analyze language and reality, human and nonhuman life, mind and matter, without falling into well-worn paths of thinking. Bringing ecocriticism closer to the material turn, the contributions to this landmark volume focus on material forces and substances, the agency of things, processes, narratives and stories, and making meaning out of the world. This broad-ranging reflection on contemporary human experience and expression provokes new understandings of the planet to which we are intimately connected.

Exposed

Exposed PDF Author: Stacy Alaimo
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452952183
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Opening with the statement “The anthropocene is no time to set things straight,” Stacy Alaimo puts forth potent arguments for a material feminist posthumanism in the chapters that follow. From trans-species art and queer animals to naked protesting and scientific accounts of fishy humans, Exposed argues for feminist posthumanism immersed in strange agencies and scale-shifting ethics. Including such divergent topics as landscape art, ocean ecologies, and plastic activism, Alaimo explores our environmental predicaments to better understand feminist occupations of transcorporeal subjectivity. She puts scientists, activists, artists, writers, and theorists in conversation, revealing that the state of the planet in the twenty-first century has radically transformed ethics, politics, and what it means to be human. Ultimately, Exposed calls for an environmental stance in which, rather than operating from an externalized perspective, we think, feel, and act as the very stuff of the world.

The Wonder of Water

The Wonder of Water PDF Author: Ingrid Leman Stefanovic
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 148752403X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Judgment calls, values, and perceptions often implicitly affect decisions around water policies and programs. This book explores how embodied, lived experience informs such values and impacts policy and practice around water issues in critical ways.

Intelligent Computing Systems

Intelligent Computing Systems PDF Author: George A. Tsihrintzis
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3662491796
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 371

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Book Description
This book at hand explores emerging scientific and technological areas in which Intelligent Computing Systems provide efficient solutions and, thus, may play a role in the years to come. It demonstrates how Intelligent Computing Systems make use of computational methodologies that mimic nature-inspired processes to address real world problems of high complexity for which exact mathematical solutions, based on physical and statistical modelling, are intractable. Common intelligent computational methodologies are presented including artificial neural networks, evolutionary computation, genetic algorithms, artificial immune systems, fuzzy logic, swarm intelligence, artificial life, virtual worlds and hybrid methodologies based on combinations of the previous. The book will be useful to researchers, practitioners and graduate students dealing with mathematically-intractable problems. It is intended for both the expert/researcher in the field of Intelligent Computing Systems, as well as for the general reader in the fields of Artificial and Computational Intelligence who wishes to learn more about the field of Intelligent Computing Systems and its applications. An extensive list of bibliographic references at the end of each chapter guides the reader to probe further into application area of interest to him/her.

Sad Planets

Sad Planets PDF Author: Dominic Pettman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509562370
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
“Everything is sad,” wrote the Ancient poets. But is this sadness merely a human experience, projected onto the world, or is there a gloom attributable to the world itself? Could the universe be forever weeping the “tears of things”? In this series of meditations, Dominic Pettman and Eugene Thacker explore some of the key “negative affects” – both eternal and emergent – associated with climate change, environmental destruction, and cosmic solitude. In so doing they unearth something so obvious that it has gone largely unnoticed: the question of how we should feel about climate change. Between the information gathered by planetary sensors and the simple act of breathing the air, new unsettling moods are produced for which we currently lack an adequate language. Should we feel grief over the loss of our planet? Or is the strange feeling of witnessing mass extinction an indicator that the planet was never “ours” to begin with? Sad Planets explores this relationship between our all-too-human melancholia and a more impersonal sorrow, nestled in the heart of the cosmic elements. Spanning a wide range of topics – from the history of cosmology to the “existential threat” of climate change – this book is a reckoning with the limits of human existence and comprehension. As Pettman and Thacker observe, never before have we known so much about the planet and the cosmos, and yet never before have we felt so estranged from that same planet, to say nothing of the stars beyond.

The Garden of Ediacara

The Garden of Ediacara PDF Author: Mark A. McMenamin
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231105590
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
Including twenty-two photographs and more than fifty drawings of these strikingly beautiful early life forms, this book presents a mesmerizing documentary of a major scientific discovery: the oldest animal fossils ever discovered.

Symbiotic Planet

Symbiotic Planet PDF Author: Lynn Margulis
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 078672448X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 158

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Book Description
Although Charles Darwin's theory of evolution laid the foundations of modern biology, it did not tell the whole story. Most remarkably, The Origin of Species said very little about, of all things, the origins of species. Darwin and his modern successors have shown very convincingly how inherited variations are naturally selected, but they leave unanswered how variant organisms come to be in the first place. In Symbiotic Planet, renowned scientist Lynn Margulis shows that symbiosis, which simply means members of different species living in physical contact with each other, is crucial to the origins of evolutionary novelty. Ranging from bacteria, the smallest kinds of life, to the largest -- the living Earth itself -- Margulis explains the symbiotic origins of many of evolution's most important innovations. The very cells we're made of started as symbiotic unions of different kinds of bacteria. Sex -- and its inevitable corollary, death -- arose when failed attempts at cannibalism resulted in seasonally repeated mergers of some of our tiniest ancestors. Dry land became forested only after symbioses of algae and fungi evolved into plants. Since all living things are bathed by the same waters and atmosphere, all the inhabitants of Earth belong to a symbiotic union. Gaia, the finely tuned largest ecosystem of the Earth's surface, is just symbiosis as seen from space. Along the way, Margulis describes her initiation into the world of science and the early steps in the present revolution in evolutionary biology; the importance of species classification for how we think about the living world; and the way "academic apartheid" can block scientific advancement. Written with enthusiasm and authority, this is a book that could change the way you view our living Earth.

Blue Ecocriticism and the Oceanic Imperative

Blue Ecocriticism and the Oceanic Imperative PDF Author: Sidney I. Dobrin
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 0429851804
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
This book initiates a conversation about blue ecocriticism: critical, ethical, cultural, and political positions that emerge from oceanic or aquatic frames of mind rather than traditional land-based approaches. Ecocriticism has rapidly become not only a disciplinary legitimate critical form but also one of the most dynamic, active criticisms to emerge in recent times. However, even in its institutional success, ecocriticism has exemplified an "ocean deficit." That is, ecocriticism has thus far primarily been a land-based criticism stranded on a liquid planet. Blue Ecocriticism and the Oceanic Imperative contributes to efforts to overcome ecocriticism’s "ocean-deficit." The chapters explore a vast archive of oceanic literature, visual art, television and film, games, theory, and criticism. By examining the relationships between these representations of ocean and cultural imaginaries, Blue Ecocriticism works to unmoor ecocriticism from its land-based anchors. This book aims to simultaneously advance blue ecocriticism as an intellectual pursuit within the environmental humanities and to advocate for ocean conservation as derivative of that pursuit.

Symbiosis

Symbiosis PDF Author: Surindar Paracer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198027885
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
The first edition of this book, published by University Press of New England in 1986, sold over 2500 copies, and was received as the best introductory overview of this broad field. Quite a lot has happened in the field of symbiosis in the past 10 years, especially concerning molecular mechanisms. Ahmadjian and Paracer have thoroughly updated their book, addressing advances in the field and the emergence of fields such as cellular microbiology, immunoparasitology, and endocytobiology, which have revealed new aspects of symbiosis. It is the only book to cover all aspects of symbiosis at an introductory level.

Water Stewardship

Water Stewardship PDF Author: Pernille Ingildsen
Publisher: IWA Publishing
ISBN: 178906032X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
Achieving true wholesome sustainability requires a change of heart. Hence this book starts in the heart. It asks the timely question of ‘how do we become true water stewards?’ The transformation to a new sustainable practice will be made through a new connection with our heart, a more holistic type of analysis (brains) and the right actions based on personal integrity (hand). A water steward should be similar to the shepherds of olden days. They were given the responsibility to guard the sheep. The village trusted they would take care of the flock, make sure it would be well fed, protected from storms and kept together. The shepherd learned to take a long term perspective for the flock, ensuring that the pastures were not overgrazed, that the flock was not led too far away from access to water and that shelter was in reach in the event of storms and dangerous predators. Over time the shepherds became increasingly skilled in caring for the flock. They integrated the responsibility of the well-being of the flock into their identity. In a similar way, we can take the responsibility for human water consumption and our interaction with the natural world. We need to understand and work according to the big picture and the very long term perspective. Being a water steward requires deep reflection of how water should be treated and our relationship with water. Water utility professionals have the knowledge and have been trusted with the role of managing human water consumption. This is a great responsibility and requires deep reflection of how this should be done. The book will present ideas and concepts for the new role as well as questions for personal reflection.