Emergent Ecologies

In an era of global warming, natural disasters, endangered species, and devastating pollution, contemporary writing on the environment largely focuses on doomsday scenarios. Eben Kirksey suggests we reject such apocalyptic thinking and instead find possibilities in the wreckage of ongoing disasters, as symbiotic associations of opportunistic plants, animals, and microbes are flourishing in unexpected places. Emergent Ecologies uses artwork and contemporary philosophy to illustrate hopeful opportunities and reframe key problems in conservation biology such as invasive species, extinction, environmental management, and reforestation. Following the flight of capital and nomadic forms of life—through fragmented landscapes of Panama, Costa Rica, and the United States—Kirksey explores how chance encounters, historical accidents, and parasitic invasions have shaped present and future multispecies communities. New generations of thinkers and tinkerers are learning how to care for emergent ecological assemblages—involving frogs, fungal pathogens, ants, monkeys, people, and plants—by seeding them, nurturing them, protecting them, and ultimately letting go.

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Heritage Ecologies presents an ecological understanding of heritage that furthers a concern for how its making and unmaking always involves a wide range of human and other-than-human actors. Recognizing the entangled nature-cultures of heritage is essential in the Anthropocene era, where uncertainty and rapid environmental change force us to recast common conceptions of inheritance and to envision new strategies for preservation. Heritage sites are meant to be open and shared spaces, and a recurring argument in the cases presented here is that this openness inevitably also overrides our selections, orders and appreciations. Through a diverse range of case studies, the chapters collected in this book aim to explore the affects and memories engendered by diverse heritage ecologies where humans are neither the sole makers nor the only inheritors. The common call is that the experiential, perceptive and informational plenitude enabled through contributions of other-than-human actors is key to an ecological rethinking of heritage in the twenty-first century. Heritage Ecologies is unique in bringing heritage studies into closer proximity with a wide variety of non-representational and object-oriented theories and is an important volume for students and researchers in archaeology and heritage studies.

Ecologies for Learning and Practice provides the first systematic account of the ideas of learning ecologies and ecologies of practice and locates the two concepts within the context of our contemporary world. It focuses on how individuals and society are being presented with all manner of learning challenges arising from fluidities and disruptions, which extend across all domains of life. This book examines emerging ways of understanding and living purposively in these new fluidities and provides fresh perspectives on the way we learn and achieve in such dynamic contexts. Providing an insight into the research of a range of internationally renowned contributors, this book explores diverse topics from the higher education and adult learning worlds. These include: The challenges faced by education systems today The concept of ecologies for learning and practice The role and responsibility of higher education institutions in advancing ecological approaches to learning The different eco-social systems of the world—local and global, economic, cultural, practical, technological, and ethical How adult learners might create and manage their own ecologies for learning and practice in order to sustain themselves and flourish With its proposals for individual and institutional learning in the 21st century and concerns for our sustainability in a fragile world, Ecologies for Learning and Practice is an essential guide for all who seek to encourage and facilitate learning in a world that is fundamentally ecological in nature.

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.

Post-industrial urban spaces typically include abandoned factories, disused rail lines, old pits and quarries, and de-commissioned landfills. In these places, different visions compete for dominance with respect to current and future land uses. Neighbours often view such urban greenspace as polluted, unkempt and weedy, harbouring undesirable biophysical features and people. These are spaces that often become the focus of some form of revitalization, reinvestment and restoration. From the perspective of civic authorities and urban planners, transforming post-industrial landscapes into disciplined and tended greenspace creates the urban conditions and signals of popular contemporary taste that attract investors, gentrifiers, and tourists. But post-industrial spaces are also places where unique and unpredictable human and ecological associations can emerge spontaneously. Such places may contain considerable ecological integrity and biodiversity and host human populations who find a home and respite in such ecologies. They also tell stories of an industrial and urban past that should be acknowledged, understood and (if suitable) celebrated. This volume explores the environmental justice and injustice dimensions of emerging urban post-industrial landscapes, including the ecological politics, cultural representations and aesthetics of these spaces. This bookw as published as a special issue of Local Environment.

If twenty-first-century urbanization is understood as a problem, its regional epicenter is the cities in Asia. Facing unprecedented diversity in scale, scope, and environmental dynamics in the Asian urban experience, scholars will need an approach that can truly capture the significance of place and context. The challenge, as this volume illustrates, can be met by the analytic of ecologies of urbanism. Eschewing a rigid, single ecology, the contributors identify multiple forms of nature—in biophysical, cultural, and political terms—that have discernable impact on power relations and human social action. The case studies in this book—including leopards in Mumbai, a network of tubewells in northern India, an island that grows through reclamation in Hong Kong, and a railway continuum linking Khon Kaen and Bangkok—all attest to the versatility of ecologies of urbanism. Guided by urban processes rather than geopolitical boundaries, Places of Nature in Ecologies of Urbanism offers a picture of urban Asia that is composed of varied ecologies of urbanism. “This intellectually adventurous work displays a deep cultural-ethical sensibility in its close attention to geographically variegated forms of place making. A first-rate contribution to urban scholarship on Asia and beyond.” —Vinay K. Gidwani, Department of Geography, Environment and Society and Institute for Global Studies, University of Minnesota “This volume derives from a several-year collaborative effort to bring scholars from different disciplines together to reflect on the constructed, shifting, and contested meanings of the forward-slash separating Urban/Natures. The essays in this volume are bold, rigorous, original, and sometimes even witty. Without losing track of the intellectual genealogies that enable their collective effort, the authors in Places of Nature in Ecologies of Urbanism give us new tools for imagining urban Asia’s possible futures.” —William Glover, Department of History, University of Michigan

Anthropocene Ecologies brings political ecology and tourism studies to bear on the Anthropocene. Through a collective examination of political ecologies of the Anthropocene by leading scholars in anthropology, geography and tourism studies, the book addresses critical themes of gender, health, conservation, agriculture, climate change, disaster, coastal marine management and sustainability. Each chapter theoretically and empirically unravels entanglements of tourism, nature and imagination to expose the political-ecological drivers of the Anthropocene as a material and symbolic force and its deepening integration with tourism. Grounded in ethnographic and qualitative research, the volume is interdisciplinary in scope, yet linked in its shared focus on the political threat as well as the social potential of the Anthropocene and its imaginaries. This collection contributes to emerging scholarship on tourism, sustainability and global environmental change in the current geological epoch. Anthropocene Ecologies will be of great interest to political ecology focused scholars of tourism, socio-environmental change and the Anthropocene. The chapters were originally published as a special issue in the Journal of Sustainable Tourism.