Ecocriticism, Environmental Justice, and the Rights of Nature (original) (raw)
The Politics of Rights of Nature
2021
This project would not have been possible without the support of our institutions-Coastal Carolina University (Pam) and the University of Oregon (Craig)-and the generous colleagues who read drafts, commented, and provided time for our writing. We thank the Rockefeller Brothers Fund for its generous financial support of our survey project. The Oregon Humanities Center and the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oregon provided support for indexing, for which we are
""This review includes the Estok-Robisch controversy, a critique of environmental justice criticism, the first collection of ecocritical art history, the MFS, MELUS and JoE specials, and books by Felstiner, Fromm, Johnson and Hulme. Please refer to the published version for citations: Chapter 3 : Ecocriticism Greg Garrard The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory 2011 doi: 10.1093/ywcct/mbr003""
Art and Environmentalist Practice
Column in _Capitalism, Nature, Socialism_ Those at the art/science/environment juncture face head-on the challenge of our century, attempting daily to be artists, activists, dialecticians, and scientific practitioners simultaneously. Their fellow travelers are already on board: art critics, robot designers, amateur scientists, professional hackers, and post-disciplinary anarchists. The voices of red-green political ecologists belong in this engagement. The issues raised at this productive nexus call out for a reading that is simultaneously historical and red, ecological and feminist, critical and resistant, dialectical and materialist.
An Essay on Ecocriticism in the Century of Restoring the Earth
JAST: Journal of American Studies of Turkey, 2009
The larger system is the biosphere, and the subsystem is the economy. The economy is geared for growth…whereas the parent system doesn't grow. It remains the same size. So as the economy grows…it encroaches upon the biosphere, and this is the fundamental cost… Herman Daly I went to the land of sagebrush, towering pine trees, and clear blue skies, in 2010, to spend my sabbatical year in the English Department at the University of Nevada, Reno, which has the major graduate program in the U.S. devoted to Literature and Environment. 1 In the future, when I look back to this year, I will remember it as a meaningful time that gave me a unique opportunity to explore the dedicated literary activities of American ecocritics in saving the planet from ongoing environmental injustices. I will also remember it as the time when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded and blighted the Earth, devastating the Gulf of Mexico. Paradoxes akin to my own experience are frequently recast in American environmental writing: on the one hand, an attitude of dominion over the land, and on the other, the strong attitude of the committed writers and the
Art History, 2020
Review of three monographs: The Ecological Eye: Assembling an Ecocritical Art History by Andrew Patrizio, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019, 216 pages, paperback, £19.99 Landscape into Eco Art: Articulations of Nature Since the 60s by Mark A. Cheetham, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018, 256 pages, 27 colour and 36 b/w illustrations, paperback, 34.95PlasticCapitalism:ContemporaryArtandtheDrivetoWastebyAmandaBoetzkes,Cambridge:MITPress,2019,272pages,81colourand5b/willustrations,hardback,34.95 Plastic Capitalism: Contemporary Art and the Drive to Waste by Amanda Boetzkes, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2019, 272 pages, 81 colour and 5 b/w illustrations, hardback, 34.95PlasticCapitalism:ContemporaryArtandtheDrivetoWastebyAmandaBoetzkes,Cambridge:MITPress,2019,272pages,81colourand5b/willustrations,hardback,34.95
A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History
Studies in Art Education: A Journal of Issues and Research in Art Education, 2012
Keener Perception (2009) has sought to highlight research in American art history with an ecocritical perspective, the ethical integration of visual analysis, cultural interpretation, and environmental history. Editors Alan Braddock and Christoph Irmscher have questioned how art historians and scholars who care about climate change can respond through scholarly inquiry in a way that fosters solutions through the transformation of environmental perception and historical understanding. They have offered this book as a re-imagination of environmental relations and possibilities for our planet, through its highlighting of environmental contexts of past cultural artifacts, bringing attention to neglected evidence of past ecological sensibility, casting canonical works and figures in a new light regarding environmental concerns, and emphasizing the particular ways in which human creativity unfolds within different environments. They have asserted that ecocritical art history challenges anthropocentrism while fostering a greater awareness of environmental relationships, the predicament of nonhumans, and limits of human dominion. I recommend this book as a model and content resource to inspire both art teachers and curriculum developers to reimagine how we teach about historical and contemporary
Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology
Third Text, 2013
This special issue of Third Text, dedicated to contemporary art and the politics of ecology, investigates the intersection of art criticism, politico-ecological theory, environmental activism and postcolonial globalization. The focus is on practices and discourses of eco-aesthetics that have emerged in recent years in geopolitical areas as diverse as the Arctic, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Europe and Mexico. The numerous contributors address new aesthetic strategies through which current ecological emergencies-including but not limited to the multifaceted crisis of climate change-have found resonance and creative response in artistic practice and more broadly in visual culture. Numerous key questions motivated our investigation: If ecological imperatives are frequently invoked by governments, corporations and certain strands of environmental activism in the name of a post-political 'green' consensus for which nothing less than the life of the planet is at stake, how might critical art contribute to an imagination of ecology that addresses social divisions related to race, class, gender and geography in the North and South alike? How might the concept of biopolitics, as elaborated by figures ranging from Bruno Latour to Vandana Shiva, enable a rethinking of hitherto articulated discourses of eco-aesthetics, especially as regards the relationship between ecological art and eco-feminism, or the art and ecology of democratic political composition? How might cultural practitioners contest the financialization of nature by neoliberal globalization, as analysed in Marxist approaches to political ecology, and how might they provide alternatives to the economic valuation of nature or promote a new articulation of the commons against its corporate enclosure? To what extent are recent philosophical writings associated with the so-called 'speculative realism' movement (for instance, those of
Environmental Justice in Contemporary US Narratives
Environmental Justice in Contemporary US Narratives
Environmental Justice in Contemporary US Narratives Environmental Justice in Contemporary US Narratives examines post-1929 US artistic interrogations of environmental disruption. Tracing themes of pollution, marine life, and agricultural production in the work of a number of historically significant writers including John Steinbeck, Ruth Ozeki, and Cherríe Moraga, this book outlines a series of incisive dialogues on transnational flows of capital and environmental justice. Texts ranging from The Grapes of Wrath (1939) to Body Toxic (2001) represent the body as vulnerable to a host of environmental risks. They identify "natural disasters" not just as environmental hazards and catastrophes, but also as events intertwined with socioeconomic issues. With careful textual analysis, Athanassakis shows how twentieth-and twentyfirst-century US writers have sought to rethink traditional understandings of how the human being relates to ecological phenomena. Their work, and this study, offer new modes of creative engagement with environmental degradationengagement that is proactive, ambivalent, and even playful. This book contributes to vital discussions about the importance of literature for social justice movements, food studies, ecocriticism, and the environmental humanities. The core argument of the book is that artistically imaginative narratives of environmental disturbance can help humans contend with ostensibly uncontrollable, drastic planetary changes. Yanoula Athanassakis received her PhD in English (American literature), with a global studies emphasis, from the University of California at Santa Barbara, USA. She is Co-Founder of the Environmental Humanities Series at
Environmental Art and Ecological Citizenship
Environmental artworks are not an aesthetic affront against nature because the aesthetic qualities of artworks are to some extent a function of other sorts of qualities, such as moral, social, or ecological qualities. By appealing to a new ecological paradigm, we can characterize environmental artworks as anthropogenic disturbances and evaluate them accordingly. Andrew Light’s model of ecological citizenship emphasizes public participation in ecological restoration projects, which are very similar to environmental artworks. Participation in the creation, appreciation, and criticism of environmental art can count as a form of ecological citizenship when these practices provoke public deliberation about environmental and other community-regarding values.