immanence

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?