Field Notes from a Hidden City
Field Notes from a Hidden City

Author: Esther Woolfson

Publisher: Catapult

Published: 2014-02-11

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1619023490

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Field Notes From a Hidden City is set against the background of the austere, grey and beautiful northeast Scottish city of Aberdeen. In it, Esther Woolfson examines the elements—geographic, atmospheric and environmental—which bring diverse life forms to live in close proximity in cities. Using the circumstances of her own life, house, garden and city, she writes of the animals who live among us: the birds—gulls, starlings, pigeons, sparrows and others—the rats and squirrels, the cetaceans, the spiders and the insects. In beautiful, absorbing prose, Woolfson describes the seasons, the streets and the quiet places of her city over the course of a year, which begins with the exceptional cold and snow of 2010. Influenced by her own long experience of corvids, she considers prevailing attitudes towards the natural world, urban and non–urban wildlife, the values we place on the lives of individual species and the ways in which man and creature live together in cities.

Field Notes from a Hidden City
Field Notes from a Hidden City

Author: Esther Woolfson

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2014-01-21

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 1619022400

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Field Notes From a Hidden City is set against the background of the austere, grey and beautiful northeast Scottish city of Aberdeen. In it, Esther Woolfson examines the elements—geographic, atmospheric and environmental—which bring diverse life forms to live in close proximity in cities. Using the circumstances of her own life, house, garden and city, she writes of the animals who live among us: the birds—gulls, starlings, pigeons, sparrows and others—the rats and squirrels, the cetaceans, the spiders and the insects. In beautiful, absorbing prose, Woolfson describes the seasons, the streets and the quiet places of her city over the course of a year, which begins with the exceptional cold and snow of 2010. Influenced by her own long experience of corvids, she considers prevailing attitudes towards the natural world, urban and non–urban wildlife, the values we place on the lives of individual species and the ways in which man and creature live together in cities.

City Creatures
City Creatures

Author: Gavin Van Horn

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2015-11-03

Total Pages: 390

ISBN-13: 022628929X

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This anthology explores Chicago’s surprisingly diverse wildlife through essays, poetry, paintings, and photographs. We usually think of cities as the domain of humans—but we are just one of thousands of species that call the urban landscape home. While Chicago residents are likely familiar with squirrels, pigeons, and dogs, many would be surprised to learn about the leafhoppers and water bears, black-crowned night herons and bison, beavers and massasauga rattlesnakes that are living alongside them. City Creatures introduces readers these and other creatures through a variety of creative contributions. Contributors bring a story-based approach to this urban safari, taking readers on birding expeditions to the Magic Hedge at Montrose Harbor on the North Side, canoe trips down the South Fork of the Chicago River (better known as Bubbly Creek), and insect-collecting forays or restoration work days in the suburban forest preserves. The book is organized into six sections, each highlighting one type of place in which people might encounter animals in the city and suburbs. For example, schoolyard chickens and warrior wasps populate “Backyard Diversity,” and a chorus of deep-freeze frogs awaits in “Water Worlds.” Its powerful combination of insightful narratives, numinous poetry, and full-color art will help readers see the city—and the creatures who share it with us—in an entirely new light.

Ecolinguistics
Ecolinguistics

Author: Arran Stibbe

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-12-27

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 1000293653

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Ecolinguistics: Language, Ecology and the Stories We Live By is a ground-breaking book which reveals the stories that underpin unequal and unsustainable societies and searches for inspirational forms of language that can help rebuild a kinder, more ecological world. This new edition has been updated and expanded to bring together the latest ecolinguistic studies with new theoretical insights and practical analyses. The book presents a theoretical framework and practical tools for analysing the key texts which shape the society we live in. The theory is illustrated through examples, including the representation of environmental refugees in the media; the construction of the selfish consumer in economics textbooks; the parallels between climate change denial and coronavirus denial; the erasure of nature in the Sustainable Development Goals; creation myths and how they orient people towards the natural world; and inspirational forms of language in nature writing, Japanese haiku and Native American writing. This edition provides an updated theoretical framework, new example analyses, and an additional chapter on narratives. Accompanied by a free online course with videos, PowerPoints, notes and exercises (www.storiesweliveby.org.uk), as well as a comprehensive glossary, this is essential reading for undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers working in the areas of Discourse Analysis, Environmental Studies and Communication Studies.

The 99% Invisible City
The 99% Invisible City

Author: Roman Mars

Publisher: Dey Street Books

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 405

ISBN-13: 0358126606

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A beautifully designed guidebook to the unnoticed yet essential elements of our cities, from the creators of the wildly popular 99% Invisible podcast

Natura Urbana
Natura Urbana

Author: Matthew Gandy

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2022-03-08

Total Pages: 432

ISBN-13: 0262367467

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A study of urban nature that draws together different strands of urban ecology as well as insights derived from feminist, posthuman, and postcolonial thought. Postindustrial transitions and changing cultures of nature have produced an unprecedented degree of fascination with urban biodiversity. The “other nature” that flourishes in marginal urban spaces, at one remove from the controlled contours of metropolitan nature, is not the poor relation of rural flora and fauna. Indeed, these islands of biodiversity underline the porosity of the distinction between urban and rural. In Natura Urbana, Matthew Gandy explores urban nature as a multilayered material and symbolic entity, through the lens of urban ecology and the parallel study of diverse cultures of nature at a global scale. Gandy examines the articulation of alternative, and in some cases, counterhegemonic, sources of knowledge about urban nature produced by artists, writers, scientists, as well as curious citizens, including voices seldom heard in environmental discourse. The book is driven by Gandy’s fascination with spontaneous forms of urban nature ranging from postindustrial wastelands brimming with life to the return of such predators as wolves and leopards on the urban fringe. Gandy develops a critical synthesis between different strands of urban ecology and considers whether "urban political ecology," broadly defined, might be imaginatively extended to take fuller account of both the historiography of the ecological sciences,and recent insights derived from feminist, posthuman, and postcolonial thought.

Routledge Handbook of Human-Animal Studies
Routledge Handbook of Human-Animal Studies

Author: Garry Marvin

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-04-16

Total Pages: 333

ISBN-13: 1136237887

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Human-animal studies is an academic field that has grown exponentially over the past decade. It explores the whys, hows, and whats of human-animal relations: why animals are represented and configured in different ways in human cultures and societies around the world; how they are imagined, experienced, and given significance; what these relationships might signify about being human; and what about these relationships might be improved for the sake of the individuals as well as the communities concerned. The Routledge Handbook of Human-Animal Studies presents a collection of original essays from artists and scholars who have established themselves internationally on the basis of specific and significant new contributions to human-animal studies. This international, interdisciplinary handbook will be of interest to students and scholars of human-animal studies, sociology, anthropology, biology, environmental studies, geography, cultural studies, history, philosophy, media studies, gender studies, literature, psychology, ethology, and visual studies.

Climate Crisis and the 21st-Century British Novel
Climate Crisis and the 21st-Century British Novel

Author: Astrid Bracke

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-11-02

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 1474271138

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This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. The challenge of rapid climate change is forcing us to rethink traditional attitudes to nature. This book is the first study to chart these changing attitudes in 21st-century British fiction. Climate Crisis and the 21st-Century British Novel examines twelve works that reflect growing cultural awareness of climate crisis and participate in the reshaping of the stories that surround it. Central to this renegotiation are four narratives: environmental collapse, pastoral, urban and polar. Bringing ecocriticism into dialogue with narratology and a new body of contemporary writing, Astrid Bracke explores a wide range of texts, from Zadie Smith's NW through Sarah Hall's The Carhullan Army and David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas to the work of a new generation of novelists such as Melissa Harrison and Ross Raisin. As the book shows, post-millennial fictions provide the imaginative space in which to rethink the stories we tell about ourselves and the natural world in a time of crisis.

Darwin-Inspired Learning
Darwin-Inspired Learning

Author: Carolyn J. Boulter

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2015-01-19

Total Pages: 429

ISBN-13: 9462098336

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Charles Darwin has been extensively analysed and written about as a scientist, Victorian, father and husband. However, this is the first book to present a carefully thought out pedagogical approach to learning that is centered on Darwin’s life and scientific practice. The ways in which Darwin developed his scientific ideas, and their far reaching effects, continue to challenge and provoke contemporary teachers and learners, inspiring them to consider both how scientists work and how individual humans ‘read nature’. Darwin-inspired learning, as proposed in this international collection of essays, is an enquiry-based pedagogy, that takes the professional practice of Charles Darwin as its source. Without seeking to idealise the man, Darwin-inspired learning places importance on: • active learning • hands-on enquiry • critical thinking • creativity • argumentation • interdisciplinarity. In an increasingly urbanised world, first-hand observations of living plants and animals are becoming rarer. Indeed, some commentators suggest that such encounters are under threat and children are living in a time of ‘nature-deficit’. Darwin-inspired learning, with its focus on close observation and hands-on enquiry, seeks to re-engage children and young people with the living world through critical and creative thinking modeled on Darwin’s life and science.

The Human–Animal Boundary
The Human–Animal Boundary

Author: Mario Wenning

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2018-11-27

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 149855783X

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Throughout the centuries philosophers and poets alike have defended an essential difference—rather than a porous transition—between the human and animal. Attempts to assign essential properties to humans (e.g., language, reason, or morality) often reflected ulterior aims to defend a privileged position for humans.. This book shifts the traditional anthropocentric focus of philosophy and literature by combining the questions “What is human?” and “What is animal?” What makes this collection unique is that it fills a lacuna in critical animal studies and the growing field of ecocriticism. It is the first collection that establishes a productive encounter between philosophical perspectives on the human–animal boundary and those that draw on fictional literature. The objective is to establish a dialogue between those disciplines with the goal of expanding the imaginative scope of human-animal relationships. The contributions thus do not only trace and deconstruct the boundaries dividing humans and nonhuman animals, they also present the reader with alternative perspectives on the porous continuum and surprising reversal of what appears as human and what as nonhuman.