Ecological Crisis

Media and the Ecological Crisis is a collaborative work of interdisciplinary writers engaged in mapping, understanding and addressing the complex contribution of media to the current ecological crisis. The book is informed by a fusion of scholarly, practitioner, and activist interests to inform, educate, and advocate for real, environmentally sound changes in design, policy, industrial, and consumer practices. Aligned with an emerging area of scholarship devoted to identifying and analysing the material physical links of media technologies, cultural production, and environment, it contributes to the project of greening media studies by raising awareness of media technology’s concrete environmental effects.

This book examines the concept of liberty in relation to civilization’s ability to live within ecological limits. Freedom, in all its renditions – choice, thought, action – has become inextricably linked to our understanding of what it means to be modern citizens. And yet, it is our relatively unbounded freedom that has resulted in so much ecological devastation. Liberty has piggy-backed on transformations in human–nature relationships that characterize the Anthropocene: increasing extraction of resources, industrialization, technological development, ecological destruction, and mass production linked to global consumerism. This volume provides a deeply critical examination of the concept of liberty as it relates to environmental politics and ethics in the long view. Contributions explore this entanglement of freedom and the ecological crisis, as well as investigate alternative modernities and more ecologically benign ways of living on Earth. The overarching framework for this collection is that liberty and agency need to be rethought before these strongly held ideals of our age are forced out. On a finite planet, our choices will become limited if we hope to survive the climatic transitions set in motion by uncontrolled consumption of resources and energy over the past 150 years. This volume suggests concrete political and philosophical approaches and governance strategies for learning how to flourish in new ways within the ecological constraints of the planet. Mapping out new ways forward for long-term ecological well-being, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of ecology, environmental ethics, politics, and sociology, and for the wider audience interested in the human–Earth relationship and global sustainability.

In this much-needed account of what has gone wrong in our thinking about the environment, Val Plumwood digs at the roots of environmental degradation. She argues that we need to see nature as an end itself, rather than an instrument to get what we want. Using a range of examples, Plumwood presents a radically new picture of how our culture must change to accommodate nature.

Explores the prospects for reinstating the state as the facilitator of environmental protection, through analyses and case studies of the green democratic potential of the state and the state system.

The environmental crisis besieges morality with unanswered questions and ethical dilemmas, requiring fresh examination of nature's value, animal rights, activism, and despair.

The Philosophical Roots of the Ecological Crisis: Descartes and the Modern Worldview traces the conceptual sources of the present environmental degradation within the worldview of Modernity, and particularly within the thought of René Descartes, universally acclaimed as the father of modern philosophy. The book demonstrates how the triple foundations of the Modern worldview – in terms of an exaggerated anthropocentrism, a mechanistic conception of the natural world, and the metaphysical dualism between humanity and the rest of the physical world – can all be largely traced back to Cartesian thought, with direct ecological consequences.

Curating in a Time of Ecological Crisis reaffirms the relevance and impactful role of art, revealing how contemporary art exhibitions can capture the zeitgeist and advance new and collaborative approaches to a more sustainable inhabitation of Earth. The book is largely focused on biennales, which it argues are the contemporary exhibition models with the greatest capacity to offer new perspectives and propose alternative ways of connecting with our social and natural environments. Felicity Fenner demonstrates this by showing how curators of these high-profile exhibitions are responding in creative and engaging ways to the issues that preoccupy artists and society more broadly, of which the ecological crisis is paramount. Drawing on case studies from different parts of the world, the author reveals how biennales can make a constructive contribution to debates and attitudes around climate change, and how the role of the curator has evolved to re-embrace a duty of care not just to art but to the natural world as well. Curating in a Time of Ecological Crisis investigates how large-scale exhibitions of contemporary international art can become agents of change. As such, the book will be essential reading for scholars, students, and practitioners with an interest in exhibitions, curating, contemporary art, and environmental sustainability.

This book's pluralistic, non-dogmatic, and committed investigation of the values of ecological sustainability, economic justice, and human dignity provides balanced analysis of environmental problems and their potential solutions.