In Wetlands and Western Cultures: Denigration to Conservation, Rod Giblett examines the portrayal of wetlands in Western culture and argues for their conservation. Giblett’s analysis of the wetland motif in literature and the arts, including in Beowulf and the writings of Tolkien and Thoreau, demonstrates two approaches to wetlands—their denigration as dead waters or their commendation as living waters with a potent cultural history.
Swamps and marshes have traditionally been regarded as places of horror and ill health in western culture - places to be feared, drained and filled. In this wide-ranging study, Rod Giblett examines the swamp from a cross-disciplinary standpoint. Using material from fiction, films and popular culture and drawing on literature, cultural studies, philosophy, social theory, critical geography and medical history, he criticises the urge to drain swamps ('the project of modernity') as masculinist and imperialist.
Combining memoir and studies in the Environmental Humanities, Black Swan Song weaves together an autobiographically-based account of the unique life and work of Rod Giblett. For over 25 years he was a leading local wetland conservationist, environmental activist, and pioneer transdisciplinary researcher and writer of fiction and non-fiction. He has researched, written, and published more than 25 books in the environmental humanities, especially wetland cultural studies, and psychoanalytic ecology. Black Swan Song traces Rod’s early and later life and work from being born in Borneo as the child of Christian missionaries, through his childhood in Bible College, being a High School dropout and studying at three universities to becoming an academic, activist and author, and now a writer. Following in the footsteps of New Lives of the Saints: Twelve Environmental Apostles, Black Swan Song also comprises conversations in conservation counter-theology between the twelve minor biblical prophets and twelve environmental apostles, such as Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, John Muir, and Rachel Carson. It also introduces the lives and works of twelve more environmental apostles, such as John Clare, Rebecca Solnit, John Charles Ryan, and others who have made a valuable contribution to green thinking and living. Black Swan Song mixes modes and genres, such as memoir, essay, story, criticism, etc., making up the writer’s black swan song. It provides ways of living and being with the earth in dark and troubled times by providing resources of a journey of hope for learning to live bio- and psycho-symbiotic livelihoods in bioregional home habitats of the living earth and in the Symbiocene, the hoped-for age superseding the Anthropocene.
Among the most productive ecosystems on earth, wetlands are also some of the most vulnerable. Australian Wetland Cultures argues for the cultural value of wetlands. Through a focus on swamps and their conservation, the volume makes a unique contribution to the growing interdisciplinary field of the environmental humanities. The authors investigate the crucial role of swamps in Australian society through the idea of wetland cultures. The broad historical and cultural range of the book spans pre-settlement indigenous Australian cultures, nineteenth-century European colonization, and contemporary Australian engagements with wetland habitats. The contributors situate the Australian emphasis in international cultural and ecological contexts. Case studies from Perth, Western Australia, provide practical examples of the conservation of wetlands as sites of interlinked natural and cultural heritage. The volume will appeal to readers with interests in anthropology, Australian studies, cultural studies, ecological science, environmental studies, and heritage protection.
“One book leads to another; one book grows out of another; one book flows out of others. Flowing is a fitting figure for a book about a river, creeks, wetlands and water. The present volume grew out of a brief discussion of two paintings of wetlands in mid-western Victoria by the nineteenth-century colonial landscape painter Eugene von Guérard. This discussion was part of a chapter on wetlands in Australian painting and photography (Giblett 2020a). It was included in John Ryan’s and Li Chen’s edited collection Australian Wetland Cultures (Ryan and Chen, eds 2020). I also contributed a chapter to this volume on Aboriginal wetland cultures, their sacral water beings and their refraction in Rainbow Serpent anthropology and Rainbow Spirit theology (Giblett 2020e). I take up and develop this discussion in the present volume in relation to particular Aboriginal peoples and places in mid-western Victoria, their practices of wetland cultures and their stories about and images of them, including the Rainbow Serpent." Contents Introduction to the Hopkins River, Its Basin, People and Places 13 Chapter 1. The Cast of Characters and A Companion of A Captain of Conservation. 35 Chapter 2. Where The River Rises: The Upper Hopkins, Its Creeks and Lake Bolac. 57 Chapter 3. Wetlands of ‘Australia Felix’: Between ‘The Grampians’ and The Upper Hopkins 77 Chapter 4. A Ramble Along The River: Through Colonial Places On The Middle Hopkins 103 Chapter 5. People and Place of Hissing Swan: Wetlands On The Middle Hopkins 125 Chapter 6. Framlingham and Hopkins Falls: Aboriginal Places and People On The Lower Hopkins 147 Chapter 7. Where The River Meets The Sea: The Hopkins Estuary 167
Where can you find mosses that change landscapes, salamanders with algae in their skin, and carnivorous plants containing whole ecosystems in their furled leaves? Where can you find swamp-trompers, wildlife watchers, marsh managers, and mud-mad scientists? In wetlands, those complex habitats that play such vital ecological roles. In Wading Right In, Catherine Owen Koning and Sharon M. Ashworth take us on a journey into wetlands through stories from the people who wade in the muck. Traveling alongside scientists, explorers, and kids with waders and nets, the authors uncover the inextricably entwined relationships between the water flows, natural chemistry, soils, flora, and fauna of our floodplain forests, fens, bogs, marshes, and mires. Tales of mighty efforts to protect rare orchids, restore salt marshes, and preserve sedge meadows become portals through which we visit major wetland types and discover their secrets, while also learning critical ecological lessons. The United States still loses wetlands at a rate of 13,800 acres per year. Such loss diminishes the water quality of our rivers and lakes, depletes our capacity for flood control, reduces our ability to mitigate climate change, and further impoverishes our biodiversity. Koning and Ashworth’s stories captivate the imagination and inspire the emotional and intellectual connections we need to commit to protecting these magical and mysterious places.
Water and land interrelate in surprising and ambiguous ways, and riparian zones, where land and water meet, have effects far outside their boundaries. Using the Malheur Basin in southeastern Oregon as a case study, this intriguing and nuanced book explores the ways people have envisioned boundaries between water and land, the ways they have altered these places, and the often unintended results. The Malheur Basin, once home to the largest cattle empires in the world, experienced unintended widespread environmental degradation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After establishment in 1908 of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge as a protected breeding ground for migratory birds, and its expansion in the 1930s and 1940s, the area experienced equally extreme intended modifications aimed at restoring riparian habitat. Refuge managers ditched wetlands, channelized rivers, applied Agent Orange and rotenone to waterways, killed beaver, and cut down willows. Where Land and Water Meet examines the reasoning behind and effects of these interventions, gleaning lessons from their successes and failures. Although remote and specific, the Malheur Basin has myriad ecological and political connections to much larger places. This detailed look at one tangled history of riparian restoration shows how—through appreciation of the complexity of environmental and social influences on land use, and through effective handling of conflict—people can learn to practice a style of pragmatic adaptive resource management that avoids rigid adherence to single agendas and fosters improved relationships with the land.
How to Make A Wetland tells the story of two Turkish coastal areas, both shaped by ecological change and political uncertainty. On the Black Sea coast and the shores of the Aegean, farmers, scientists, fishermen, and families grapple with livelihoods in transition, as their environment is bound up in national and international conservation projects. Bridges and drainage canals, apartment buildings and highways—as well as the birds, water buffalo, and various animals of the regions—all inform a moral ecology in the making. Drawing on six years of fieldwork in wetlands and deltas, Caterina Scaramelli offers an anthropological understanding of sweeping environmental and infrastructural change, and the moral claims made on livability and materiality in Turkey, and beyond. Beginning from a moral ecological position, she takes into account the notion that politics is not simply projected onto animals, plants, soil, water, sediments, rocks, and other non-human beings and materials. Rather, people make politics through them. With this book, she highlights the aspirations, moral relations, and care practices in constant play in contestations and alliances over environmental change.
Water Stories in the Anthropocene explores how climate change has emerged as a major theme in our daily lives as it poses a myriad of economic, scientific, political and cultural challenges in the age of the Anthropocene. In all its forms and manifestations, climate change is primarily a water crisis. Water scarcity, droughts, floods, deluge, rising sea levels, ice melting, wetlands loss and sea pollution are among the main threats posed by climate change, wreaking havoc on both human and nonhuman forms of life. This book engages with instances of extreme events related to water (droughts, floods, deluges) and the impact of climate change on some waterbodies (seas and wetlands) in contemporary Anglophone novels. By taking into account a corpus of novels ranging from the various areas of the Anglophone world, and thus shuttling between the Global North and the Global South, the book reads these novels as "water stories." This volume pays attention to the pervasive presence of water in all aspects of our lives, thus showing how narratives can offer insightful accounts of the present water crisis. Alternating between an econarratological perspective, reflections on the Anthropocene and the human/nonhuman imbrications within the blue humanities, the book contributes significantly to the considerations of the imaginative possibilities of these water stories, showing how narratives can offer insightful accounts of the present water crisis.
