Air The Restless Shaper Of The World

The author of Dirt and Oak brings to life this quickest, most sustaining, most communicative element of the earth. Air sustains the living. Every creature breathes to live, exchanging and changing the atmosphere. Water and dust spin and rise, make clouds and fall again, fertilizing the dirt. Twenty thousand fungal spores and half a million bacteria travel in a square foot of summer air. The chemical sense of aphids, the ultraviolet sight of swifts, a newborn’s awareness of its mother’s breast—all take place in the medium of air. Ignorance of the air is costly. The artist Eva Hesse died of inhaling her fiberglass medium. Thousands were sickened after 9/11 by supposedly “safe” air. The African Sahel suffers drought in part because we fill the air with industrial dusts. With the passionate narrative style and wide-ranging erudition that have made William Bryant Logan’s work a touchstone for nature lovers and environmentalists, Air is—like the contents of a bag of seaborne dust that Darwin collected aboard the Beagle—a treasure trove of discovery.

Winner of the 2023 ANZATS Award for the Best Monograph by an Established Scholar Applying a re-envisioned, ecological, feminist hermeneutics, this book builds on two important responses to twentieth- and twenty-first-century situations of ecological trauma, especially the complex contexts of climate change and cross-species relations: first, ecological feminism; second, ecological hermeneutics in the Earth Bible tradition. By way of readings of selected biblical texts, this book suggests that an ecological feminist aesthetic, bringing present situation and biblical text into conversation through engagement with activism and literature, principally poetry, is helpful in decolonizing ethics. Such an approach is both informed by and speaks back to the new materialism in ecological criticism.

Elemental Ecocriticism: An in-depth exploration of the intricate relationship between nature and human existence through the lenses of four visionary poets. This book delves into the macro- and micro-level injustices inflicted upon the elements of nature, as conveyed through systematically crafted narratives. Through the poetical verses of these four poets, the principles and features of the elements are showcased, highlighting their importance for human ecstasy and existence. A must-read for those seeking a deeper understanding of the complex interplay between humanity and the natural world.

For centuries it was believed that all matter was composed of four elements: earth, air, water, and fire in promiscuous combination, bound by love and pulled apart by strife. Elemental theory offered a mode of understanding materiality that did not center the cosmos around the human. Outgrown as a science, the elements are now what we build our houses against. Their renunciation has fostered only estrangement from the material world. The essays collected in Elemental Ecocriticism show how elemental materiality precipitates new engagements with the ecological. Here the classical elements reveal the vitality of supposedly inert substances (mud, water, earth, air), chemical processes (fire), and natural phenomena, as well as the promise in the abandoned and the unreal (ether, phlogiston, spontaneous generation). Decentering the human, this volume provides important correctives to the idea of the material world as mere resource. Three response essays meditate on the connections of this collaborative project to the framing of modern-day ecological concerns. A renewed intimacy with the elemental holds the potential of a more dynamic environmental ethics and the possibility of a reinvigorated materialism.

Wes “Scoop” Nisker is an award-winning broadcast journalist and commentator, a renowned Buddhist meditation teacher, a best selling author and a captivating performer. In How to be an Earthling, Wes draws on his diverse experiences delivering a collection that brims with the insight, humor and wisdom he is famous for. Compiling for the first time, Wes’ best known essays as well as a selection of recent and never before published work, Wes takes readers on both a cultural journey (a tour through the sixties, through the modern environmental movement, the surge of Buddhism to the West) and a more personal one, exploring the motivation behind humanity’s search for spiritual enlightenment.

This book explores the vital role of the imagination in today’s complex climates—cultural, environmental, political, racial, religious, spiritual, intellectual, etc. It asks: What contribution do the arts make in a world facing the impacts of globalism, climate change, pandemics, and losses of culture? What wisdom and insight, and orientation for birthing hope and action in the world, do the arts offer to religious faith and to theological reflection? These essays, poems, and short reflections—written by art practitioners and academics from a diversity of cultures and religious traditions—demonstrate the complex cross-cultural nature of this conversation, examining critical questions in dialogue with various art forms and practices, and offering a way of understanding how the human imagination is formed, sustained, employed, and expanded. Marked by beauty and wonder, as well as incisive critique, it is a unique collection that brings unexpected voices into a global conversation about imagining human futures.

Clouds have been objects of delight and fascination throughout human history, their fleeting magnificence and endless variety having inspired scientists and daydreamers alike. Described by Aristophanes as “the patron goddesses of idle men,” clouds and the ever-changing patterns they create have long symbolized the restlessness and unpredictability of nature, and yet they are also the source of life-giving rains. In this book, Richard Hamblyn examines clouds in their cultural, historic, and scientific contexts, exploring their prevalence in our skies as well as in our literature, art, and music. As Hamblyn shows, clouds function not only as a crucial means of circulating water around the globe but also as a finely tuned thermostat regulating the planet’s temperature. He discusses the many different kinds of clouds, from high, scattered cirrus clouds to the plump thought-bubbles of cumulus clouds, even exploring man-made clouds and clouds on other planets. He also shows how clouds have featured as meaningful symbols in human culture, whether as ominous portents of coming calamities or as ethereal figures giving shape to the heavens, whether in Wordsworth’s poetry or today’s tech speak. Comprehensive yet compact, cogent and beautifully illustrated, this is the ultimate guidebook to those shapeshifters of the sky.

Almost seventy-five years ago, MI9 dreamt up the most audacious escape and evasion plan of World War Two. Formulated by Airey Neave, one of the first men ever to escape from Colditz, this plan was one of subterfuge, concealment and deception on a scale never seen before. With numerous downed RAF and Allied pilots on the run in Europe and with the fabled Comete Escape Line having been infiltrated by double agents, Neave's plan was to hide these men right under the very noses of the Nazis rather than risk repatriation. Choosing a forest in the heart of France, right next to one of the German Army's largest ammunition bases, Neave, Belgian agents and the French Resistance would secretly transport and hide Allied pilots and soldiers within feet of the enemy. Nobody thought it would work, but such was the success of the secret camp that a whole community of over one hundred and fifty Allied escapers lived within the forest for three months in the run-up to D-Day. Despite numerous close shaves, they were never discovered and this outrageous plan, brilliant in its simplicity, saw the Allied evaders make their home in the forest, cooking and hunting to survive - and even setting up a golf course in the forest using branches for clubs - without discovery. This operation remained absolutely secret, to the point that the inhabitants of the villages surrounding the forest were unaware, until the end, of the existence of that allied force so close to them. Told through interviews with evaders, members of the Resistance and the children charged with smuggling food into the forest, this book tells the compelling story of one of the most audacious operations in World War Two. A story that has, until today, remained as secret as the Hidden Army of Freteval.