I’ve just come across the earliest outline I wrote for the course I’m currently teaching (in its third incarnation), “Environmental Literature, Arts, and Media.” The course has also turned into a book project I’m working on, which will be a thematic primer to the environmental arts and humanities. Both course and book have changed shape so profoundly that this original outline is hardly visible in them. But I like this list of themes, so I thought I’d share it. Let me know if you think there’s anything important that I’ve missed.
Eco-Humanities: Green Culture & the Environmental Imagination
Eden Creation stories, poetics of Arcadia, Renaissance and early modern pastoral, landscape painting, nature writing, Boy Scouts and imagined Indians (E. T. Seton), Leo Marx’s Machine in the Garden, Wendell Berry, the Back-to-the-Land and Local Food movements
Landscape Renaissance optics, empirical observation, landscape as view and as possession, sublime vs. beautiful vs. picturesque, national landscape imaginaries (England, USA, Japan, China, others)
Nature Science and colonialism, disciplines of observation, tropical exploration, nature and science writing, Darwin, evolutionary imagery, visualizations of ecosystems (Tansley, Odum, et al.), the Biophilia hypothesis
Tropics The age of exploration, jungles and rainforests, colonialism & the imagination of race, indigenous peoples, Brazilian Tropicalia, the tourist gaze, rainforest politics, Herzog’s ironic sublime (Aguirre), shamanic tourism and medicinal commerce
Walking Wordsworth, Thoreau, Gandhi, the politics of walking (Rebecca Solnit), Aboriginal songlines, the nomadic imagination, the art of Richard Long
Mountains European romanticism, John Muir, American landscape painting (Thomas Cole), Weimar Germany’s Bergfilmen, mountaineering and cultures of masculinity, the imagination of Shangri-La (Theosophy, Lost Horizon), Gary Snyder
Monsters Pollution and abomination (things out of place; Mary Douglas), the technological imagination, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, gothic and horror literature/film, the GMOs debate
Animals Totemism, domestication and historical human-animal relations, hunting and the Bambi debate, Disney, animals in kids’ culture, the animal rights/liberation movement and anti-fur activism (Singer, Regan, ALF)
Trees Trees as metaphors (Trees of Life, etc.), Druid tree calendars, forests in history (R. P. Harrison), sacred trees (India), forest activism (Chipko, Earth First! tree sits, Julia Hill)
Gardens History of gardens, English landscape gardens, East Asian landscape/garden aesthetics, park design, Frederick Law Olmsted, the garden cities movement, suburbia, guerrilla gardening
Food Dietary cultures, vegetarianism in history, the organic food movement, Wendell Berry, veganism, freeganism, “slow food” and locavore cultures, edible art
Wild cities The industrial imagination, Malthus and industrial London, “urban jungles,” ecotopian future cities (Fuller, Soleri, arcologies), urban ecology and “green cities,” anarchist free cities (e.g., Christiania), Hakim Bey’s TAZ, the Occupy movement, public art “ecoventions”
Water Daoist philosophy, Javanese gamelan music, organic motifs in western art and music (art nouveau, Debussy, exoticism, psychedelic and ambient music), bottled water, anti-water privatization movements (Cochabamba, et al.)
Oceans Cetaceans, John Lilly, Greenpeace, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, The Cove, collapsing fisheries, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch
Trash The culture of disposability, plastics, recycling and trash art, ecologies of computerization, Wall-E, trash sublime (Ed Burtysnky, Chris Jordan, et al.)
Petrochemicals Industrialization, Blake’s “dark Satanic mills,” automobility, plasticity, addiction, toxic landscapes (from the Missisippi to the Niger deltas), extreme fossil fuels, “No Pipelines” & the disinvestment movement
Apocalypse Eco-apocalypse and the dystopian imagination (from Silent Spring to Soylent Green to Mad Max to Darwin’s Nightmare to The Road to zombies et al.), Burning Man, New Age culture, ecosteries and neo-monasticism
Space Whole Earth iconography, NASA and space exploration, the Gaia hypothesis, terraforming and ecotopian futures (K. S. Robinson’s Mars trilogy)
Climate Weather as “pathetic fallacy,” emotions and temperament, climate science, representations of climate change in image and film (Day After Tomorrow), climate denialism
Heroes and movements Environmental “saints,” Nobels and other awards, Earth Summits, Big Green (lobbyists) versus grassroots groups, the politics of words (environment, ecology, sustainability, resilience, justice) and coalition building
Race and class, war and peace Environmental refugees, environmentalism’s class politics, the Environmental Justice and Climate Justice movements (Beasts of the Southern Wild)
Futures Ecotopian visions (Callenbach, LeGuin, Starhawk, et al.), Transition Towns, the US Northwest and Vermont as ecotopias?
i like it but would add heaven/hell for the triple-layer cake cosmos & gods (heidegger&otherpagans)
http://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/walking-matters-part-2-1.2914045
https://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2015-09-29/andrea-wulf-the-invention-of-nature-alexander-von-humboldts-new-world
I don’t think you’ve missed anything major but its awell compiled list; I like the heroes idea!