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.\u00a0Both course and book have changed shape so profoundly that this original outline is hardly\u00a0visible 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.<\/p>\n
Eco-Humanities: Green Culture &\u00a0the Environmental Imagination<\/strong><\/p>\n Eden\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>Creation stories, poetics of Arcadia, Renaissance and early modern pastoral, landscape painting, nature writing, Boy Scouts and imagined Indians (E. T. Seton), Leo Marx\u2019s Machine in the Garden, <\/em>Wendell Berry, the Back-to-the-Land and Local Food movements Landscape<\/strong> \u00a0Renaissance optics, empirical observation, landscape as view and as possession, sublime vs. beautiful vs. picturesque,\u00a0national landscape imaginaries (England, USA, Japan, China, others)<\/p>\n Nature <\/strong>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<\/p>\n Tropics\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>The age of exploration, jungles and rainforests, colonialism & the imagination of race, indigenous peoples, Brazilian Tropicalia<\/em>, the tourist gaze, rainforest politics, Herzog’s ironic sublime (Aguirre<\/em>), shamanic tourism and medicinal commerce<\/p>\n Walking<\/strong> \u00a0Wordsworth, Thoreau, Gandhi, the politics of walking (Rebecca Solnit), Aboriginal songlines, the nomadic imagination, the art of Richard Long<\/p>\n Mountains\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>European romanticism, John Muir, American landscape painting (Thomas Cole), Weimar Germany\u2019s Bergfilmen, <\/em>mountaineering and cultures of masculinity, the imagination of Shangri-La (Theosophy, Lost Horizon<\/em>), Gary Snyder<\/p>\n Monsters\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>Pollution and abomination (things out of place; Mary Douglas), the technological imagination, Mary Shelley\u2019s Frankenstein,<\/em> gothic and horror literature\/film, the GMOs debate<\/p>\n Animals\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>Totemism, domestication and historical human-animal relations, hunting and the Bambi <\/em>debate, Disney, animals in kids\u2019 culture, the animal rights\/liberation movement and anti-fur activism (Singer,\u00a0Regan, ALF)<\/p>\n Trees <\/strong>\u00a0Trees 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)<\/p>\n Gardens\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>History of gardens, English landscape gardens, East Asian landscape\/garden aesthetics, park design, Frederick Law Olmsted, the garden cities movement, suburbia, guerrilla gardening<\/p>\n Food\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>Dietary cultures, vegetarianism in history, the organic food movement, Wendell Berry, veganism, freeganism, \u201cslow food\u201d and locavore cultures, edible art<\/p>\n Wild cities\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>The industrial imagination, Malthus and industrial London, \u201curban jungles,\u201d ecotopian future cities (Fuller, Soleri, arcologies), urban ecology and \u201cgreen cities,\u201d anarchist free cities (e.g., Christiania), Hakim Bey’s TAZ, the Occupy movement, public art \u201cecoventions\u201d<\/p>\n Water\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>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.)<\/p>\n Oceans\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>Cetaceans, John Lilly, Greenpeace, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, The Cove,<\/em>\u00a0collapsing fisheries, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch<\/p>\n Trash\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>The culture of disposability, plastics, recycling and trash art, ecologies of computerization, Wall-E,<\/em>\u00a0trash sublime (Ed Burtysnky, Chris Jordan, et al.)<\/p>\n Petrochemicals<\/strong>\u00a0 \u00a0Industrialization, Blake’s “dark Satanic mills,” automobility, plasticity, addiction, toxic\u00a0landscapes (from the Missisippi to the Niger deltas), extreme fossil fuels, “No Pipelines” & the disinvestment movement<\/p>\n Apocalypse <\/strong>\u00a0Eco-apocalypse and the dystopian imagination (from Silent Spring<\/em> to Soylent Green<\/em> to\u00a0Mad Max <\/em>to Darwin\u2019s Nightmare <\/em>to\u00a0The Road\u00a0<\/em>to zombies et al.), Burning Man, New Age culture, ecosteries and neo-monasticism<\/p>\n Space<\/strong> \u00a0Whole Earth iconography, NASA and space exploration, the Gaia hypothesis, terraforming and ecotopian futures (K. S. Robinson\u2019s Mars <\/em>trilogy)<\/p>\n Climate\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>Weather as \u201cpathetic fallacy,\u201d emotions and temperament, climate science, representations of climate change in image and film (Day After Tomorrow<\/em>), climate denialism<\/p>\n Heroes and movements\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>Environmental \u201csaints,\u201d Nobels and other awards, Earth Summits, Big Green (lobbyists) versus grassroots groups, the politics of words (environment, ecology, sustainability, resilience, justice) and coalition building<\/p>\n Race and class, war and peace\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>Environmental refugees, environmentalism\u2019s class politics, the Environmental Justice and Climate Justice movements (Beasts of the Southern Wild<\/em>)<\/p>\n Futures\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>Ecotopian visions (Callenbach, LeGuin, Starhawk, et al.), Transition Towns, the US Northwest and Vermont as ecotopias?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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.\u00a0Both course and book have changed shape so […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[203,4415],"tags":[123662,25057],"class_list":["post-8394","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academe","category-ecophilosophy","tag-eco-humanities","tag-environmental-humanities"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-2bo","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":7577,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2014\/06\/10\/nyc-arts-humanities-on-the-anthropocene\/","url_meta":{"origin":8394,"position":0},"title":"NYC: Arts & Humanities on the Anthropocene","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"June 10, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"This week's AESS conference\u00a0\"Welcome to the Anthropocene\" features a breakfast roundtable called \"The Arts and Humanities Respond to the Anthropocene.\" See the session description below. Unfortunately the panelists have been dropping like flies: it looks like neither dancer and performance artist Jennifer Monson,\u00a0eco-artist Jackie Brookner, nor performer and comedian Jennifer\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Anthropocene"","block_context":{"text":"Anthropocene","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/anthropo_scene\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8785,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2016\/06\/08\/state-of-the-eco-humanities-take-1\/","url_meta":{"origin":8394,"position":1},"title":"State of the Eco-Humanities, Take 1","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"June 8, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"This post is the first of a series of reflections on the state of the Environmental Humanities, or Eco-Humanities, and of where this interdisciplinary field might be headed. 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\n<\/strong><\/p>\n