The Environmental Humanities And The Ancient World

What can a study of antiquity contribute to the interdisciplinary paradigm of the environmental humanities? And how does this recent paradigm influence the way we perceive human-'nature' interactions in pre-modernity? By asking these and a number of related questions, this Element aims to show why the ancient tradition still matters in the Anthropocene. Offering new perspectives to think about what directions the ecological turn could take in classical studies, it revisits old material, including ancient Greek religion and mythology, with central concepts of contemporary environmental theory. It also critically engages with forms of classical reception in current debates, arguing that ancient ecological knowledge is a powerful resource for creating alternative world views.

There has been an increasing archaeological interest in human-animal-nature relations, where archaeology has shifted from a focus on deciphering meaning, or understanding symbols and the social construction of the landscape to an acknowledgment of how things, places, and the environment contribute with their own agencies to the shaping of relations.This means that the environment cannot be regarded as a blank space that landscape meaning is projected onto. Parallel to this, the field of environmental humanities poses the question of how to work with the intermeshing of humans and their surroundings.To allow the environment back in as an active agent of change, means that landscape archaeology can deal better with issues such as global warming, an escalating loss of biodiversity, as well as increasingly toxic environment. However, this does not leave human agency out of the equation. It is humans who reinforce the environmental challenges of today.The scholarly field of the humanities deal with questions like how is meaning attributed, what cultural factors drive human action, what role is played by ethics, how is landscape experienced emotionally, as well as how concepts derived from art, literature, and history function in such processes of meaning attribution and other cultural processes. This humanities approach is of utmost importance when dealing with climate and environmental challenges ahead and we need a new landscape archaeology that meets these challenges, but also that meets well across disciplinary boundaries. Here inspiration can be found in discussions with scholars in the emerging field of Environmental Humanities.

Lively and accessible account of the relationship between man and nature in Graeco-Roman antiquity. Describes the ways in which the Greeks and Romans intervened in the environment and thus traces the history of tension between the exploitation of resources and the protection of nature.

Although current environmental debates lay the focus on the Industrial Revolution as a sociopolitical development that has led to the current environmental crisis, many ecocritical projects have avoided historicizing their concepts or have been characterized by approaches that were either pre-historic or post-historic: while the environmental movement has harbored the dream of restoring nature to a state untouched by human hands, there is also the pessimistic vision of a post-apocalyptic world, exhausted by humanity’s consumption of natural resources. Against this background, the decline of nature has become a narrative template quite common among the public environmental discourse and environmental scientists alike. The volume revisits Antiquity as an epoch which witnessed similar environmental problems and came up with its own interpretations and solutions in dealing with them. This decidedly historical perspective is not only supposed to fill in a blank in ecocritical discourse, but also to question, problematize, and inform our contemporary debates with a completely different take on “nature” and humanity’s place in the world. Thereby, a productive dialogue between contemporary ecocritical theories and the classical tradition is established that highlights similarities as well as differences. This volume is the first book to bring ecocriticism and the classical tradition into a comprehensive dialogue. It assembles recognized experts in the field and advanced scholars as well as young and aspiring ecocritics. In order to ensure a dialogic exchange between the contributions, the volume includes four response essays by established ecocritics which embed the sections within a larger theoretical and practical ecocritical framework and discuss the potential of including the pre-modern world into our environmental debates.

Now in its third edition, Grounding Religion explores relationships between the environment and religious beliefs and practices. Established scholars introduce students to the ways religion shapes and is shaped by human–earth relations, surveying a series of key issues and questions, with particular attention to issues of environmental degradation, social justice, ritual practices, and religious worldviews. Case studies, discussion questions, and further readings enrich students’ experience. This third edition features updated content, including revisions of every chapter and new material on religion and the environmental humanities, sexuality and queer studies, class, ability, privilege and power, environmental justice, extinction, biodiversity, and politics. An excellent text for undergraduates and graduates alike, it offers an expansive overview of the academic field of religion and ecology as it has emerged in the past fifty years and continues to develop today.

Bringing together new writing by some of the field’s most compelling voices from the United States and Europe, this is the first book to examine Italy--as a territory of both matter and imagination--through the lens of the environmental humanities. The contributors offer a wide spectrum of approaches--including ecocriticism, film studies, environmental history and sociology, eco-art, and animal and landscape studies--to move past cliché and reimagine Italy as a hybrid, plural, eloquent place. Among the topics investigated are post-seismic rubble and the stratifying geosocial layers of the Anthropocene, the landscape connections in the work of writers such as Calvino and Buzzati, the contaminated fields of the ecomafia’s trafficking, Slow Food’s gastronomy of liberation, poetic birds and historic forests, resident parasites, and nonhuman creatures. At a time when the tension between the local and the global requires that we reconsider our multiple roots and porous place-identities, Italy and the Environmental Humanities builds a creative critical discourse and offers a series of new voices that will enrich not just nationally oriented discussions, but the entire debate on environmental culture. Contributors: Marco Armiero, Royal Institute of Technology at Stockholm * Franco Arminio, Writer, poet, and filmmaker * Patrick Barron, University of Massachusetts * Damiano Benvegnù, Dartmouth College and the Oxford Center for Animal Ethics * Viktor Berberi, University of Minnesota, Morris * Rosi Braidotti, Utrecht University * Luca Bugnone, University of Turin * Enrico Cesaretti, University of Virginia *Almo Farina, University of Urbino * Sophia Maxine Farmer, University of Wisconsin-Madison * Serena Ferrando, Colby College * Tiziano Fratus, Writer, poet, and tree-seeker * Matteo Gilebbi, Duke University * Andrea Hajek, University of Warwick * Marcus Hall, University of Zurich * Serenella Iovino, University of Turin * Andrea Lerda, freelance curator * Roberto Marchesini, Study Center of Posthuman Philosophy in Bologna * Marco Moro, Editor-in-Chief of Edizioni Ambiente, Milan * Elena Past, Wayne State University * Carlo Petrini, Founder of International Slow Food Movement * Ilaria Tabusso Marcyan, Miami University (Ohio)* Monica Seger, College of William and Mary * Pasquale Verdicchio, University of California, San Diego

Over the course of the past century, there has been a sustained reflective engagement about environmental risks, disasters, and human vulnerability in our modern industrial world. This inquiry has raised a host of crucial questions. Just how safe is humanity in a world of toxic chemicals and industrial installations that have destructive potential? Is it feasible to prevent large-scale catastrophes like the ones in Bhopal, Chernobyl, and Fukushima and smaller-scale disasters such as oil spills and gas leaks? How do environmental hazards affect social and political orders? S. Ravi Rajan expertly synthesizes decades of public policy and academic discourse on how societies measure and ultimately come to terms with risk, danger, and vulnerability and offers a fresh, humanistic perspective for grappling with the new global scale and interconnectedness of these threats.

This book positions Ovid's Metamorphoses as a foundational text in the western history of environmental thought. The poem is about new bodies. Stones, springs, plants and animals materialize out of human origins to create a world of hybrid objects, which retain varying degrees of human subjectivity while taking on new physical form. In bending the boundaries of known categories of being, these hybrid entities reveal both the porousness of human and other agencies as well as the dangers released by their fusion. Metamorphosis unsettles the category of the human within the complex ecologies that make up the world as we know it. Drawing on a range of modern environmental theorists and approaches, the contributors to this volume trace how the Metamorphoses models the relationship between humans and other life forms in ways that resonate with the preoccupations of contemporary eco-criticism. They make the case for seeing the worldview depicted in Ovid's poem as an exemplar of the 'premodern' ecological mindset that contemporary environmental thought seeks to approximate. They also highlight critical moments in the history of the poem's ecological reception, including reflections by a contemporary poet, as well as studies of Medieval and Renaissance responses to Ovid.