In Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion, Ecology, and Film, international scholars investigate how films portray human emotional relationships with the more-than-human world and how such films act upon their viewers’ emotions. Emotion and affect are the basic mechanisms that connect us to our environment, shape our knowledge, and motivate our actions. Contributors explore how film represents and shapes human emotion in relation to different environments and what role time, place, and genre play in these affective processes. Individual essays resituate well-researched environmental films such as An Inconvenient Truth and March of the Penguins by paying close attention to their emotionalizing strategies, and bring to our attention the affective qualities of films that have so far received little attention from ecocritics, such as Stan Brakhage’s Dog Star Man. The collection opens a new discursive space at the disciplinary intersection of film studies, affect studies, and a growing body of ecocritical scholarship. It will be of interest not only to scholars and students working in the field of ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, but for everyone with an interest in our emotional responses to film.
In Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion, Ecology, and Film, international scholars investigate how films portray human emotional relationships with the more-than-human world and how such films act upon their viewers’ emotions. Emotion and affect are the basic mechanisms that connect us to our environment, shape our knowledge, and motivate our actions. Contributors explore how film represents and shapes human emotion in relation to different environments and what role time, place, and genre play in these affective processes. Individual essays resituate well-researched environmental films such as An Inconvenient Truth and March of the Penguins by paying close attention to their emotionalizing strategies, and bring to our attention the affective qualities of films that have so far received little attention from ecocritics, such as Stan Brakhage’s Dog Star Man. The collection opens a new discursive space at the disciplinary intersection of film studies, affect studies, and a growing body of ecocritical scholarship. It will be of interest not only to scholars and students working in the field of ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, but for everyone with an interest in our emotional responses to film.
Writing a New Environmental Era first considers and then rejects back-to-nature thinking and its proponents like Henry David Thoreau, arguing that human beings have never lived at peace with nature. Consequently, we need to stop thinking about going back to what never was and instead work at moving forward to forge a more harmonious relationship with nature in the future. Using the rise of the automobile and climate change denial literature to explore how our current environmental era was written into existence, Ken Hiltner argues that the humanities—and not, as might be expected, the sciences—need to lead us there. In one sense, climate change is caused by a rise in atmospheric CO2 and other so-called greenhouse gases. Science can address this cause. However, approached in another way altogether, climate change is caused by a range of troubling human activities that require the release of these gases, such as our obsessions with cars, lavish houses, air travel and endless consumer goods. The natural sciences may be able to tell us how these activities are changing our climate, but not why we are engaging in them. That’s a job for the humanities and social sciences. As this book argues, we need to see anthropogenic (i.e. human-caused) climate change for what it is and address it as such: a human problem brought about by human actions. A passionate and personal exploration of why the Environmental Humanities matter and why we should be looking forward, not back to nature, this book will be essential reading for all those interested in the future and sustainability of our planet.
"The book has two aims. First, it demonstrates the common ground between the fast-growing fields of environmental history and mobility studies in terms of subject matter, theoretical approaches, and methodology. Second, it shows how mobility--the movements of people, things, and ideas, as well as their associated cultural meanings--has been a key factor in shaping Canadians' perceptions of and interactions with their country. Approaching the burgeoning field of environmental history in Canada through the lens of mobility reveals some of the distinctive ways in which Canadians have come to terms with the country's climate and landscape. The collection seeks to accomplish these aims with a broad scope: a series of case studies that span Canada's diverse regions, from the closing of the age of sail in the late nineteenth century to post-World War II automobile culture. Chapters examine a wide range of topics, from the impact of seasonal climactic conditions on different transportation modes, to the environmental consequences of building mobility corridors and pathways, and the relationship between changing forms of mobility with tourism and other recreational activities. The contributors employ a number of methodologies, including the use of traditional archival sources (correspondence, government reports, business ledgers, publicity materials) as well as historical geographic information systems (HGIS), qualitative and quantitative analysis, and critical theory."--
This book presents an ecophilosophy of cinema: an account of the moving image in relation to the lived ecologies – material, social, and perceptual relations – within which movies are produced, consumed, and incorporated into cultural life. If cinema takes us on mental and emotional journeys, the author argues that those journeys that have reshaped our understanding of ourselves, life, and the Earth and universe. A range of styles are examined, from ethnographic and wildlife documentaries, westerns and road movies, sci-fi blockbusters and eco-disaster films to the experimental and art films of Tarkovsky, Herzog, Malick, and Brakhage, to YouTube’s expanding audio-visual universe.
ÔFor a thorough and thoughtful perspective on what it will take to de-carbonize cities of the future, this book is a must-read. Technology alone, we are told, will not create the post-carbon city. As important is coming to grips with a complex web of cultural, institutional, financial, and social factors that powerfully shape mobility choices, now and in the future. A balanced, holistic approach that reveals how the many elements of contemporary transport systems work together offers the best hope for achieving more sustainable, less carbon-intensive mobility futures.Õ Ð Robert Cervero, University of California, Berkeley, US ÔThis is not just another book about transport and climate change. It sensibly places transport within the much broader concept of mobility and explores all aspects of travel behaviour, of people and goods, and the infrastructure needs to serve these, leading to a balanced set of policy proposals. This volume, compiled by an internationally eminent team of researchers, is essential reading for all those wanting a balanced and objective analysis of this critical topic.Õ Ð Roger Vickerman, University of Kent, UK ÔA unique assemblage of papers by top international experts that together cover every aspect of the transport-mobility-environment relationship Ð todayÕs central issue for transport planners worldwide.Õ Ð Sir Peter Hall, University College London (UCL), UK The transport sector has been singularly unsuccessful in becoming low carbon and less resource intensive. This book takes an innovative and holistic social, cultural and behavioural perspective, as well as covering the more conventional economic and technological dimensions, to provide a more complete understanding of the mobility and transport system and its progress towards high carbon mobility. The book uses this platform to explore the means to achieve low carbon mobility through outlining alternative pathways, through an investigation of theories of change, and through alternative visions of the low carbon transport city. The bookÕs core message is that the complexity of the mobility and transport system should not encourage inaction, but strong and immediate action. In addition to implementing a wide range of policy measures, the book argues for a fundamental change in ÔthinkingÕ when it comes to transport policy, governance and analysis approaches, before low carbon mobility becomes a reality. Bringing together the latest thinking on transport, mobility and the environment, this book will appeal to researchers and students interested in sustainability issues and sustainable transport and transport related areas in particular, including policy makers as well as a more general professional audience.
The United States is among the wealthiest nations in the world, but it is far from the healthiest. Although life expectancy and survival rates in the United States have improved dramatically over the past century, Americans live shorter lives and experience more injuries and illnesses than people in other high-income countries. The U.S. health disadvantage cannot be attributed solely to the adverse health status of racial or ethnic minorities or poor people: even highly advantaged Americans are in worse health than their counterparts in other, "peer" countries. In light of the new and growing evidence about the U.S. health disadvantage, the National Institutes of Health asked the National Research Council (NRC) and the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to convene a panel of experts to study the issue. The Panel on Understanding Cross-National Health Differences Among High-Income Countries examined whether the U.S. health disadvantage exists across the life span, considered potential explanations, and assessed the larger implications of the findings. U.S. Health in International Perspective presents detailed evidence on the issue, explores the possible explanations for the shorter and less healthy lives of Americans than those of people in comparable countries, and recommends actions by both government and nongovernment agencies and organizations to address the U.S. health disadvantage.
Over the past century, we have made great strides in reducing rates of disease and enhancing people's general health. Public health measures such as sanitation, improved hygiene, and vaccines; reduced hazards in the workplace; new drugs and clinical procedures; and, more recently, a growing understanding of the human genome have each played a role in extending the duration and raising the quality of human life. But research conducted over the past few decades shows us that this progress, much of which was based on investigating one causative factor at a time—often, through a single discipline or by a narrow range of practitioners—can only go so far. Genes, Behavior, and the Social Environment examines a number of well-described gene-environment interactions, reviews the state of the science in researching such interactions, and recommends priorities not only for research itself but also for its workforce, resource, and infrastructural needs.
Half a century ago, many democratic states started to respond to environmental pressures that had arisen in the wake of rapid industrialization. They set up environmental ministries and agencies and issued legislation to control the pollution of air and water and to manage industrial processes, wastes and toxic substances. This was the birth of the environmental state. With planetary ecological challenges like climate change spiraling out of control and dwarfing the environmental state’s classical tasks of environmental management, new questions about the transformative capacities of the state are becoming acute today. How large is the state’s capability to transform enhanced industrial societies into sustainable post-carbon societies? Do its new environmental functions empower the state to prioritise ecological goals over economic growth? Can the state’s environmental management capabilities be radicalised to turn it into a ‘sustainability state’? Can democracies be enhanced to enlarge the state’s transformative capacities? The Political Prospects of a Sustainability Transformation: Moving Beyond the Environmental State explores these and other questions from a variety of theoretical and empirical angles, covering the fields of democratic theory, theories of the state, political economy, political sociology, rhetoric and political philosophy. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Environmental Politics.
This book focuses on one critical challenge: climate change. Climate change is predicted to lead to an increased intensity and frequency of natural disasters. An increase in extreme weather events, global temperatures and higher sea levels may lead to displacement and migration, and will affect many dimensions of the economy and society. Although scholars are examining the complexity and fragmentation of the climate change regime, they have not examined how our existing international development, migration and humanitarian organizations are dealing with climate change. Focusing on three institutions: the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the International Organization for Migration and the United Nations Development Programme, the book asks: how have these inter-governmental organizations responded to climate change? And are they moving beyond their original mandates, given none were established with a mandate for climate change? It traces their responses to climate change in their rhetoric, policy, structure, operations and overall mandate change. Hall argues that international bureaucrats can play an important role in mandate expansion, often deciding whether and how to expand into a new issue-area and then lobbying states to endorse this expansion. They make changes in rhetoric, policy, structure and operations on the ground, and therefore forge, frame and internalize new issue-linkages. This book helps us to understand how institutions established in the 20th century are adapting to a 21st century world. It will be of great interest to scholars and students of International Relations, Development Studies, Environmental Politics, International Organizations and Global Governance, as well as international officials.
