"Langston focuses on three ghost species in the Great Lakes watershed-woodland caribou, common loons, and lake sturgeon. Their traces are still present in DNA, small fragmented populations, or in lone individuals. We can still restore them, if we make the hard choices necessary for them to survive"--
Climate Ghosts deals with the important issue of climate change and human impact on three species: woodland caribou, common loons, and lake sturgeon. Environmental historian Nancy Langston explores three "ghost species" in the Great Lakes watershed--woodland caribou, common loons, and lake sturgeon. Ghost species are those that have not gone completely extinct, although they may be extirpated from a particular area. Their traces are still present, whether in DNA, in small fragmented populations, in lone individuals roaming a desolate landscape in search of a mate. We can still restore them if we make the hard choices necessary for them to survive. In this meticulously researched book, Langston delves into how climate change and human impact affected these now ghost species. Climate Ghosts covers one of the key issues of our time.
"Langston focuses on three ghost species in the Great Lakes watershed-woodland caribou, common loons, and lake sturgeon. Their traces are still present in DNA, small fragmented populations, or in lone individuals. We can still restore them, if we make the hard choices necessary for them to survive"--
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.
Once upon a time, a number of adventurous scientists moved out from the known terrain of scientific literature to explore the terrain of science related story writing and storytelling. They aimed to create short stories, which address the current threats our oceans undergo due to "human-made" climate change, contamination and exploitation. The first part of the adventure is now completed. The imagination formed into words and several illustrators took a step further to transform words into images. We present before you these adventures and invite you to sail with us. "Once Upon a Time... a Scientific Fairy Tale. Volume I", is an anthology of nine stories, two poems and one sustainable lifestyle guide. This is the first result of a collaborative effort of 29 scientists (the "Once Upon a Time-team", OUAT-team) and the professional support of several artists. The protagonist of the stories and poems are marine and terrestrial animals, grown-ups and youngsters, people like you and us.
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR “The best science-fiction nonfiction novel I’ve ever read.” —Jonathan Lethem "If I could get policymakers, and citizens, everywhere to read just one book this year, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future." —Ezra Klein (Vox) The Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, using fictional eyewitness accounts to tell the story of how climate change will affect us all. Its setting is not a desolate, postapocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us. Chosen by Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of the year, this extraordinary novel from visionary science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson will change the way you think about the climate crisis. "One hopes that this book is read widely—that Robinson’s audience, already large, grows by an order of magnitude. Because the point of his books is to fire the imagination."―New York Review of Books "If there’s any book that hit me hard this year, it was Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, a sweeping epic about climate change and humanity’s efforts to try and turn the tide before it’s too late." ―Polygon (Best of the Year) "Masterly." —New Yorker "[The Ministry for the Future] struck like a mallet hitting a gong, reverberating through the year ... it’s terrifying, unrelenting, but ultimately hopeful. Robinson is the SF writer of my lifetime, and this stands as some of his best work. It’s my book of the year." —Locus "Science-fiction visionary Kim Stanley Robinson makes the case for quantitative easing our way out of planetary doom." ―Bloomberg Green
Literary Animal Studies and the Climate Crisis connects insights from the field of literary animal studies with the urgent issues of climate change and environmental degradation, and features considerations of new interventions by literature in relation to these pressing questions and debates. This volume informs academic debates in terms of how nonhuman animals figure in our cultural imagination of topics such as climate change, extinction, animal otherness, the posthuman, and environmental crises. Using a diverse set of methodologies, each chapter presents relevant cases which discuss the various aspects of these interstices. This volume is an intersection between literary animal studies and climate fiction intended as an interdisciplinary intervention that speaks to the global climate debate and is thus relevant across the environmental humanities.
Ghosts and spirits populate the world around us. We just need to be sensitive or psychic enough to hear and see them. In this book, author Paul Roland examines a fascinating assortment of recorded sightings from as far back in history as Roman times. This serious look at ghosts presents them not as chain-rattling spooks or clouds of cold, swirling mist, but as entities with which we share a greater reality. A comprehensive exploration of the realm of the supernatural, from ghost ships and poltergeists to out-of-body experiences and the idea of spirits as the manifestation of people still living, The Complete Book of Ghosts will challenge your beliefs and preconceptions as never before.
"A house in the center of Bangkok becomes the point of confluence where lives are shaped by upheaval, memory, and the lure of home. Witness to two centuries' flux in one of the world's most restless cities, a house plays host to longings and losses past, present, and future. A nineteenth-century missionary doctor pines for the comforts of New England even as he finds the vibrant foreign chaos of Siam increasingly difficult to resist. A post-war society woman marries, mothers, and holds court, little suspecting the course of her future. A jazz pianist is summoned in the 1970s to conjure music that will pacify resident spirits, even as he's haunted by ghosts of his former life. Not long after, a young woman gives swimming lessons in the luxury condos that have eclipsed the old house, trying to outpace the long shadow of her political past. And in the post-submergence Bangkok of the future, a band of savvy teenagers guides tourists and former residents past waterlogged, ruined landmarks, selling them tissues to wipe their tears for places they themselves do not remember. Time collapses as these stories collide and converge, linked by blood, memory, yearning, chance, and the forces voraciously making and remaking the amphibian, ever-morphing city itself"--Provided by publisher.