Decolonial Ecology

Decolonial Ecology PDF Author: Malcom Ferdinand
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509546243
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
The world is in the midst of a storm that has shaped the history of modernity along a double fracture: on the one hand, an environmental fracture driven by a technocratic and capitalist civilization that led to the ongoing devastation of the Earth’s ecosystems and its human and non-human communities and, on the other, a colonial fracture instilled by Western colonization and imperialism that resulted in racial slavery and the domination of indigenous peoples and women in particular. In this important new book, Malcom Ferdinand challenges this double fracture, thinking from the Caribbean world. Here, the slave ship reveals the inequalities that continue during the storm: some are shackled inside the hold and even thrown overboard at the first gusts of wind. Drawing on empirical and theoretical work in the Caribbean, Ferdinand conceptualizes a decolonial ecology that holds protecting the environment together with the political struggles against (post)colonial domination, structural racism, and misogynistic practices. Facing the storm, this book is an invitation to build a world-ship where humans and non-humans can live together on a bridge of justice and shape a common world. It will be of great interest to students and scholars in environmental humanities and Latin American and Caribbean studies, as well as anyone interested in ecology, slavery, and (de)colonization.

Rock | Water | Life

Rock | Water | Life PDF Author: Lesley Green
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478004614
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
In Rock | Water | Life Lesley Green examines the interwoven realities of inequality, racism, colonialism, and environmental destruction in South Africa, calling for environmental research and governance to transition to an ecopolitical approach that could address South Africa's history of racial oppression and environmental exploitation. Green analyzes conflicting accounts of nature in environmental sciences that claim neutrality amid ongoing struggles for land restitution and environmental justice. Offering in-depth studies of environmental conflict in contemporary South Africa, Green addresses the history of contested water access in Cape Town; struggles over natural gas fracking in the Karoo; debates about decolonizing science; the potential for a politics of soil in the call for land restitution; urban baboon management; and the consequences of sending sewage to urban oceans.

Ariel's Ecology

Ariel's Ecology PDF Author: Monique Allewaert
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816689016
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
What happens if we abandon the assumption that a person is a discrete, world-making agent who acts on and creates place? This, Monique Allewaert contends, is precisely what occurred on eighteenth-century American plantations, where labor practices and ecological particularities threatened the literal and conceptual boundaries that separated persons from the natural world. Integrating political philosophy and ecocriticism with literary analysis, Ariel’s Ecology explores the forms of personhood that developed out of New World plantations, from Georgia and Florida through Jamaica to Haiti and extending into colonial metropoles such as Philadelphia. Allewaert’s examination of the writings of naturalists, novelists, and poets; the oral stories of Africans in the diaspora; and Afro-American fetish artifacts shows that persons in American plantation spaces were pulled into a web of environmental stresses, ranging from humidity to the demand for sugar. This in turn gave rise to modes of personhood explicitly attuned to human beings’ interrelation with nonhuman forces in a process we might call ecological. Certainly the possibility that colonial life revokes human agency haunts works from Shakespeare’s Tempest and Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws to Spivak’s theories of subalternity. In Allewaert’s interpretation, the transformation of colonial subjectivity into ecological personhood is not a nightmare; it is, rather, a mode of existence until now only glimmering in Che Guevara’s dictum that postcolonial resistance is synonymous with “perfect knowledge of the ground.”

The Politics of Decolonial Investigations

The Politics of Decolonial Investigations PDF Author: Walter D. Mignolo
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478002573
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description
In The Politics of Decolonial Investigations Walter D. Mignolo provides a sweeping examination of how coloniality has operated around the world in its myriad forms from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first. Decolonial border thinking allows Mignolo to outline how the combination of the self-fashioned narratives of Western civilization and the hegemony of Eurocentric thought served to eradicate all knowledges in non-European languages and praxes of living and being. Mignolo also traces the geopolitical origins of racialized and gendered classifications, modernity, globalization, and cosmopolitanism, placing them all within the framework of coloniality. Drawing on the work of theorists and decolonial practitioners from the Global South and the Global East, Mignolo shows how coloniality has provoked the emergence of decolonial politics initiated by delinking from all forms of Western knowledge and subjectivities. The urgent task, Mignolo stresses, is the epistemic reconstitution of categories of thought and praxes of living destituted in the very process of building Western civilization and the idea of modernity. The overcoming of the long-lasting hegemony of the West and its distorted legacies is already underway in all areas of human existence. Mignolo underscores the relevance of the politics of decolonial investigations, in and outside the academy, to liberate ourselves from canonized knowledge, ways of knowing, and praxes of living.

Time and Social Theory

Time and Social Theory PDF Author: Barbara Adam
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745669395
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
Time is at the forefront of contemporary scholarly inquiry across the natural sciences and the humanities. Yet the social sciences have remained substantially isolated from time-related concerns. This book argues that time should be a key part of social theory and focuses concern upon issues which have emerged as central to an understanding of today's social world. Through her analysis of time Barbara Adam shows that our contemporary social theories are firmly embedded in Newtonian science and classical dualistic philosophy. She exposes these classical frameworks of thought as inadequate to the task of conceptualizing our contemporary world of standardized time, computers, nuclear power and global telecommunications.

Ecology of Insular Southeast Asia

Ecology of Insular Southeast Asia PDF Author: Friedhelm Goltenboth
Publisher: Elsevier
ISBN: 0080467970
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 569

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Book Description
The textbook entitled Tropical Ecology of Southeast Asia – The Indonesian Archipelago unfolds in its 5 major chapters with 20 subchapters on more than 500 pages, with more than 300 figures, the basic principles of ecology with examples mainly coming from the Indonesian Archipelago. After an introduction describing the geography, geology and climate of the region, the second chapter is dedicated to marine and freshwater ecosystems. Chapters on the functional ecology of seagrass beds, coral reefs, open ocean and deep sea are followed by information on lotic and lentic freshwater ecosystems. In chapter III ecotones and special ecosystems of the achipelago are in focus. The ecology and ecosystems of shore and tidal flats, mangroves, estuaries and soft bottom shores, caves, small islands, grasslands and savannas are decribed. The forest ecosystems with beach forest, tropical lowland evergreen rainforest, some special forest systems and mountain forests form the contents of chapter IV. The final chapter V is dealing with agroecosystems and human ecology. The main focus in this chapter is ricefield ecology, landuse systems and social ecology, including the advent of man and the development and expansion of man influencing this achipelago. An extended glossary and bibliography is added as well as tables of abbreviations, conversion factors, international system of units and measurements or SI and a geological time table and systematics. The index gives assess to important keywords and relevant information spread thoughout the contents of the book. The textbook will certainly be useful to teachers, lecturers and their students at university and college level. It also gives an overview about insular ecology of the vast Indonesian archipelago to any interested person or working ecologist.* Focuses on the tropical ecology and insular ecosystems and biodiversity of Indonesia, as well as the agroecology of humid tropics * Contains over 300 figures * Provides an extended glossary and bibliography, as well as tables of abbreviations, converstion factors, international system of units and a geological time table * Easy-to-use index gives access to important keywords used throughout the text

Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta

Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta PDF Author: Debjani Bhattacharyya
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108681727
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 485

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Book Description
What happens when a distant colonial power tries to tame an unfamiliar terrain in the world's largest tidal delta? This history of dramatic ecological changes in the Bengal Delta from 1760 to 1920 involves land, water and humans, tracing the stories and struggles that link them together. Pushing beyond narratives of environmental decline, Bhattacharyya argues that 'property-thinking', a governing tool critical in making land and water discrete categories of bureaucratic and legal management, was at the heart of colonial urbanization and the technologies behind the draining of Calcutta. The story of ecological change is narrated alongside emergent practices of land speculation and transformation in colonial law. Bhattacharyya demonstrates how this history continues to shape our built environments with devastating consequences, as shown in the Bay of Bengal's receding coastline.

Contesting Extinctions

Contesting Extinctions PDF Author: Suzanne M. McCullagh
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793652821
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
Contesting Extinctions: Decolonial and Regenerative Futures critically interrogates the discursive framing of extinctions and how they relate to the systems that bring about biocultural loss. The chapters in this multidisciplinary volume examine approaches to ecological and social extinction and resurgence from a variety of fields, including environmental studies, literary studies, political science, and philosophy. Grounding their scholarship in decolonial, Indigenous, and counter-hegemonic frameworks, the contributors advocate for shifting the discursive focus from ruin to regeneration.

Agroecology Now!

Agroecology Now! PDF Author: Colin Ray Anderson
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030613151
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
This open access book develops a framework for advancing agroecology transformations focusing on power, politics and governance. It explores the potential of agroecology as a sustainable and socially just alternative to today’s dominant food regime. Agroecology is an ecological approach to farming that addresses climate change and biodiversity loss while contributing to the Sustainable Development Goals. Agroecology transformations represent a challenge to the power of corporations in controlling food system and a rejection of the industrial food systems that are at the root of many social and ecological ills. In this book the authors analyse the conditions that enable and disable agroecology’s potential and present six ‘domains of transformation’ where it comes into conflict with the dominant food system. They argue that food sovereignty, community-self organization and a shift to bottom-up governance are critical for the transformation to a socially just and ecologically viable food system. This book will be a valuable resource to researchers, students, policy makers and professionals across multidisciplinary areas including in the fields of food politics, international development, sustainability and resilience.

Meaningful Flesh

Meaningful Flesh PDF Author: Whitney A. Bauman
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 1947447327
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 154

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Book Description
Religion is much queerer than we ever imagined. Nature is as well. These are the two basic insights that have led to this volume: the authors included here hope to queerly go where no thinkers have gone before. The combination of queer theory and religion has been happening for at least 25 years. People such as John Boswell began to examine the history of religious traditions with a queer eye, and soon after we had the indecent theology of Marcella Althaus Ried. Jay Johnston, one of the authors in this issue, is among those who have used the queer eye to interrogate authority within Christian theological traditions. At the same time, there have been many queer interrogations of "nature," perhaps most notably in the works of Joan Roughgarden and Ann Fausto-Sterling, and more recently in the works of Catriona Sandilands and Timothy Morton (an author in this volume). However, the intersections of religion, nature, and queer theory have been largely left untouched. With the exception of Dan Spencer, who writes the introduction for this volume and is one of the early pioneers in this realm of thought with his book Gay and Gaia (Pilgrim Press, 1996), and the work of Greta Gaard in developing a queer ecofeminist thought, religion and nature, or religion and ecology, have largely ignored the realm of queer theory. In part, the blinders to queer theory on the part of eco-thinkers (religious or otherwise) are similar to the blinders eco-thinkers have when it comes to postmodern thought in general: namely, if there are no absolute foundations, how does one create an environmental ethic and a "nature" to save? For this reason and many others, this volume on religion, nature, and queer theory is groundbreaking. Though these essays span many different disciplines and themes, they are all held together by the triple focus on religion, nature, and queer theory. Each of these essays offers a unique contribution to the intersection of religion, nature, and queer theory, and all of them challenge strict boundaries proposed in religious rhetoric and many discourses surrounding "nature." Carol Wayne White's essay draws from a queer reading of James Baldwin to develop an African American religious naturalism, which highlights humans as polyamorous bastards. Jacob Erickson's essay examines Isabella Rossellini's "Green Porno" and Martin Luther's work to develop an irreverent theology. Jay Johnston draws from personal relationships with his late dog, and Master/Pup fetish-play to blur the boundaries between humans and other animals, specifically within ethical and theological discourse. Whitney Bauman reflects on how the very processes of globalization and climate change queer our identities and call for a queer and versatile planetary ethic. Finally, Timothy Morton leads us through a reflection on queer green sex toys to challenge the ontology of agrologistics. Each of these essays in their own way is concerned with fleshing out more meaningful encounters with the planetary community. Without being too ambitious, we hope that these sets of essays will help to open up a new trajectory of conversations at the intersection of religion, nature, and queer theory.