Literature for a Changing Planet

Literature for a Changing Planet PDF Author: Martin Puchner
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691213755
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
Puchner ranges across four thousand years of world literature to draw vital lessons about how we put ourselves on the path of climate change. He proposes a new way of reading in a warming world, shows how literature can help us recognize our shared humanity, and discusses the possible futures of storytelling

Literature for a Changing Planet

Literature for a Changing Planet PDF Author: Martin Puchner
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691213755
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 160

Get Book Here

Book Description
Puchner ranges across four thousand years of world literature to draw vital lessons about how we put ourselves on the path of climate change. He proposes a new way of reading in a warming world, shows how literature can help us recognize our shared humanity, and discusses the possible futures of storytelling

Literature for a Changing Planet

Literature for a Changing Planet PDF Author: Martin Puchner
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691230420
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
Why we must learn to tell new stories about our relationship with the earth if we are to avoid climate catastrophe Reading literature in a time of climate emergency can sometimes feel a bit like fiddling while Rome burns. Yet, at this turning point for the planet, scientists, policymakers, and activists have woken up to the power of stories in the fight against global warming. In Literature for a Changing Planet, Martin Puchner ranges across four thousand years of world literature to draw vital lessons about how we put ourselves on the path of climate change—and how we might change paths before it’s too late. From the Epic of Gilgamesh and the West African Epic of Sunjata to the Communist Manifesto, Puchner reveals world literature in a new light—as an archive of environmental exploitation and a product of a way of life responsible for climate change. Literature depends on millennia of intensive agriculture, urbanization, and resource extraction, from the clay of ancient tablets to the silicon of e-readers. Yet literature also offers powerful ways to change attitudes toward the environment. Puchner uncovers the ecological thinking behind the idea of world literature since the early nineteenth century, proposes a new way of reading in a warming world, shows how literature can help us recognize our shared humanity, and discusses the possible futures of storytelling. If we are to avoid environmental disaster, we must learn to tell the story of humans as a species responsible for global warming. Filled with important insights about the fundamental relationship between storytelling and the environment, Literature for a Changing Planet is a clarion call for readers and writers who care about the fate of life on the planet.

Planetary Health

Planetary Health PDF Author: Samuel Myers
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 1610919661
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 538

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Book Description
Human health depends on the health of the planet. Earth’s natural systems—the air, the water, the biodiversity, the climate—are our life support systems. Yet climate change, biodiversity loss, scarcity of land and freshwater, pollution and other threats are degrading these systems. The emerging field of planetary health aims to understand how these changes threaten our health and how to protect ourselves and the rest of the biosphere. Planetary Health: Protecting Nature to Protect Ourselves provides a readable introduction to this new paradigm. With an interdisciplinary approach, the book addresses a wide range of health impacts felt in the Anthropocene, including food and nutrition, infectious disease, non-communicable disease, dislocation and conflict, and mental health. It also presents strategies to combat environmental changes and its ill-effects, such as controlling toxic exposures, investing in clean energy, improving urban design, and more. Chapters are authored by widely recognized experts. The result is a comprehensive and optimistic overview of a growing field that is being adopted by researchers and universities around the world. Students of public health will gain a solid grounding in the new challenges their profession must confront, while those in the environmental sciences, agriculture, the design professions, and other fields will become familiar with the human consequences of planetary changes. Understanding how our changing environment affects our health is increasingly critical to a variety of disciplines and professions. Planetary Health is the definitive guide to this vital field.

The Written World

The Written World PDF Author: Martin Puchner
Publisher:
ISBN: 0812998936
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 458

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Book Description
"The story of literature in sixteen acts, from Alexander the Great and the Iliad to ebooks and Harry Potter, this engaging book brings together remarkable people and surprising events to show how writing shaped cultures, religions, and the history of the world"--

The World As We Knew It

The World As We Knew It PDF Author: Amy Brady
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1646220315
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
Nineteen leading literary writers from around the globe offer timely, haunting first-person reflections on how climate change has altered their lives—including essays by Lydia Millet, Alexandra Kleeman, Kim Stanley Robinson, Omar El Akkad, Lidia Yuknavitch, Melissa Febos, and more In this riveting anthology, leading literary writers reflect on how climate change has altered their lives, revealing the personal and haunting consequences of this global threat. In the opening essay, National Book Award finalist Lydia Millet mourns the end of the Saguaro cacti in her Arizona backyard due to drought. Later, Omar El Akkad contemplates how the rise of temperatures in the Middle East is destroying his home and the wellspring of his art. Gabrielle Bellot reflects on how a bizarre lionfish invasion devastated the coral reef near her home in the Caribbean—a precursor to even stranger events to come. Traveling through Nebraska, Terese Svoboda witnesses cougars running across highways and showing up in kindergartens. As the stories unfold—from Antarctica to Australia, New Hampshire to New York—an intimate portrait of a climate-changed world emerges, captured by writers whose lives jostle against incongruous memories of familiar places that have been transformed in startling ways.

Stop Saving the Planet!: An Environmentalist Manifesto

Stop Saving the Planet!: An Environmentalist Manifesto PDF Author: Jenny Price
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 039354088X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Book Description
"Pithy, funny, exasperated, and informed…You cannot read a more important hundred pages than Stop Saving the Planet!" —Richard White, author of The Republic for Which It Stands We’ve been "saving the planet" for decades!…And environmental crises just get worse. All this hybrid driving and LEED building and carbon trading seems to accomplish little to nothing—and low-income communities continue to suffer the worst consequences. Why aren’t we cleaning up the toxic messes and rolling back climate change? And why do so many Americans hate environmentalists? Jenny Price says Enough already! with this short, fun, fierce manifesto for an environmentalism that is hugely more effective, a whole lot fairer, and infinitely less righteous. She challenges you, corporate sustainability officers, and the EPA to think and act completely anew—and to start right now—to ensure a truly habitable future.

False Alarm

False Alarm PDF Author: Bjorn Lomborg
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 1541647483
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
An “essential” (Times UK) and “meticulously researched” (Forbes) book by “the skeptical environmentalist” argues that panic over climate change is causing more harm than good Hurricanes batter our coasts. Wildfires rage across the American West. Glaciers collapse in the Artic. Politicians, activists, and the media espouse a common message: climate change is destroying the planet, and we must take drastic action immediately to stop it. Children panic about their future, and adults wonder if it is even ethical to bring new life into the world. Enough, argues bestselling author Bjorn Lomborg. Climate change is real, but it's not the apocalyptic threat that we've been told it is. Projections of Earth's imminent demise are based on bad science and even worse economics. In panic, world leaders have committed to wildly expensive but largely ineffective policies that hamper growth and crowd out more pressing investments in human capital, from immunization to education. False Alarm will convince you that everything you think about climate change is wrong -- and points the way toward making the world a vastly better, if slightly warmer, place for us all.

Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet

Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet PDF Author: Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452954496
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 734

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Book Description
Living on a damaged planet challenges who we are and where we live. This timely anthology calls on twenty eminent humanists and scientists to revitalize curiosity, observation, and transdisciplinary conversation about life on earth. As human-induced environmental change threatens multispecies livability, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet puts forward a bold proposal: entangled histories, situated narratives, and thick descriptions offer urgent “arts of living.” Included are essays by scholars in anthropology, ecology, science studies, art, literature, and bioinformatics who posit critical and creative tools for collaborative survival in a more-than-human Anthropocene. The essays are organized around two key figures that also serve as the publication’s two openings: Ghosts, or landscapes haunted by the violences of modernity; and Monsters, or interspecies and intraspecies sociality. Ghosts and Monsters are tentacular, windy, and arboreal arts that invite readers to encounter ants, lichen, rocks, electrons, flying foxes, salmon, chestnut trees, mud volcanoes, border zones, graves, radioactive waste—in short, the wonders and terrors of an unintended epoch. Contributors: Karen Barad, U of California, Santa Cruz; Kate Brown, U of Maryland, Baltimore; Carla Freccero, U of California, Santa Cruz; Peter Funch, Aarhus U; Scott F. Gilbert, Swarthmore College; Deborah M. Gordon, Stanford U; Donna J. Haraway, U of California, Santa Cruz; Andreas Hejnol, U of Bergen, Norway; Ursula K. Le Guin; Marianne Elisabeth Lien, U of Oslo; Andrew Mathews, U of California, Santa Cruz; Margaret McFall-Ngai, U of Hawaii, Manoa; Ingrid M. Parker, U of California, Santa Cruz; Mary Louise Pratt, NYU; Anne Pringle, U of Wisconsin, Madison; Deborah Bird Rose, U of New South Wales, Sydney; Dorion Sagan; Lesley Stern, U of California, San Diego; Jens-Christian Svenning, Aarhus U.

At Home on an Unruly Planet

At Home on an Unruly Planet PDF Author: Madeline Ostrander
Publisher: Henry Holt
ISBN: 1250620511
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A science journalist explores how our relationship to home is shifting in an era of planetary upheaval, offering stories of resilient communities on the front lines of climate change and reflecting on how to reimagine our lives. This past summer, one in three Americans experienced some kind of weather disaster--from the flooding that overtook coastal streets and the unprecedented heat wave that overwhelmed the Pacific Northwest to the wildfires that forced many to flee their homes. Climate change used to be a distant forecast; now it has begun reaching into the familiar, threatening our basic safety, and forcing us to re-examine who we are and how we live. We are all in a more precarious position now. What happens when the rhythms, the seasons, and the known patterns within which we have built our homes and our lives go off-kilter? In At Home on an Unruly Planet, environmental journalist Madeline Ostrander reflects on what climate change means not as an abstract scientific or political problem but as a palpable force that is now affecting us at home. In lyrical prose, she offers a series of deeply reported and vivid accounts of people fighting to protect places they love from increasingly dangerous circumstances--a firefighter and small-town mayor striving to rebuild a community after catastrophic fires in the Pacific Northwest; a historic preservationist working to protect one of North America's most historic cities, St. Augustine, Florida, from rising seas; an urban farmer trying to transform the future of an oil town in northern California that's been plagued by fossil-fuel disasters; and an Alaska Native community heading for higher ground as their old village site erodes. Each is not just a story of disaster but also of hard-won optimism, resilience, and creativity--a reflection of the strengths we all need to persevere in a time of uncertainty. Interspersed among these accounts are a series of essays meditating on the idea of home: Who do we become as the conditions of life change around us? Can we still reimagine how we live in order to protect our homes and the planet we inhabit? At Home on an Unruly Planet is required reading for anyone who wants to make a home in the 21st-century, an era of both climate crisis and hope.

The Climate of History in a Planetary Age

The Climate of History in a Planetary Age PDF Author: Dipesh Chakrabarty
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022673286X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
Introduction : intimations of the planetary -- The globe and the planet. Four theses; Conjoined histories; The planet : a humanist category -- The difficulty of being modern. The difficulty of being modern; Planetary aspirations : reading a suicide in India; In the ruins of an enduring fable -- Facing the planetary. Anthropocene time -- Toward an anthropological clearing -- Postscript : the global reveals the planetary : a conversation with Bruno Latour.