Environmental Humanities

Course Description:
What would happen if we were to examine literary texts through the lens of energy? That is, what if we approached William Wordsworth’s Romantic ruminations on the “sublime” crafts of “men’s arts” as a praxis for thinking about the material forces of the sublime—“motion and means...on land and sea” made possible first by the winds that would move commerce across the Atlantic Ocean in the long sixteenth century and soon thereafter by coal? What if we understood colonial occupation in the context of East Africa or throughout Latin America in terms of the transnational plantation economies that would also be fueled by wind or hydropower or coal, and thus conducted postcolonial critiques of novels like Gabriel García Marquéz’s Autumn of the Patriarch or Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat accordingly? Might we then understand energy not merely in terms of the “fuel-injected” American dream featured in a Bruce Springsteen song, but instead as the very means of fueling culture? Might we then appreciate that the conventional tropes of literary expression and critique are the products of the material forces contemporary to each work? That petroleum, for example, isn’t simply a theme, but is that which enables the very production of culture?

As a seminar on Petrocultures, and an introduction to the Energy Humanities, this course shall focus on the imbrications between energy and cultural production in order to understand the ways in which material forces like coal or petroleum literally fuel culture.  We shall explore a wide archive of cultural works that represent, in the words of literary scholar Patricia Yaeger, the “ages of wood…coal…oil” and ultimately alternative fuel sources like wind and solar power. Writers like Ursula LeGuin, Amitav Ghosh, Kim Stanley Robinson, Muriel Rukeyser, Nawal El Saadawi. ,Paolo Bacigalupi, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Herman Melville, and many others will guide us through our new geological epoch—call it the Anthropocene or the Thermocene—illustrating the intersections of cultural discourse, political ideology, and aesthetic expression.

As we also will come to learn, there is no “age of wood,” for example, without a correlative commitment to Enlightenment notions of “improvement,” whether of self or land. There is likewise no age of oil, nor of wind, without a persistent commitment to such notions of civilizational progress as we see in the paeans to industry and “enlightenment” that generally characterize popular political thought. Thus, while we end with an exploration of alternative energy—alternatives, that is, to fossilized carbon—we likewise question whether a simple shift in fuel is sufficient to the task of averting the sorts of apocalyptic scenarios presented in novels like Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker. Ultimately, we will follow the After Oil collective in asking how aesthetic forms represent (and often reinforce) energy regimes and how, in the face of an overwhelming commitment to disaster porn, we might “frame the unimaginable,” which is to say life after carbon.

(excerpt) "We should indeed look to watery natures for inspiration. We are all part of an oceanic commons that sustains and bonds all life. Turning to water as design muse can thus be understood as a moment of recognition, where our own watery natures are amplified. But when we hail the ocean as teacher, do we also consider the silent slippage between gift and theft, between use and usurpation? What happens when the sea ceases to be an unknowable mystery, and is figured instead as inexhaustible resource? Water—as substance or idea—cannot be simply ours for the taking."

During the Minoan Neopalatial period (ca. 1700-1450 BCE) female figures are depicted in visual art sitting on rocks and stepped cult structures, both of which may be symbolic representations of mountains. Trees are also depicted in conjunction with rocks and stepped altars, sometimes replacing the female figure, and suggesting a tree-and-mountain combination. These scenes echo a tradition in the iconography of Syro-Mesopotamia, the Levant and Egypt of an association betweenand even the interchangeability of-trees, or more broadly vegetation, and female figures. While the Minoan female figures are unidentified, the east Mediterranean examples are associated with known goddesses. This paper suggests that, along with cult structures, Cretan Neopalatial female garments also belong to this tree-and-mountain symbolic visual language. Not only do abstract mountain forms appear on female garments, but the combination of female torso and elaborate skirt forms a silhouette that evokes the cult scenes in which women sit on rocks and stepped altars and platforms. Examination of the decoration, structure, and shape of Minoan Neopalatial garments as depicted in glyptic, wall painting, and three dimensions, will demonstrate their suitability for incorporation into the classification of landscape epiphany.

NEW BOOK SERIES: Maritime Literature and Culture offers alternative rubrics for literary and cultural studies to those of nation, continent and area, which inter-articulate with current debates on comparative and world literatures, globalization and planetary or Anthropocene thought in illuminating ways. The humanities have paid increasing attention to oceans, islands and shores as sites of cultural production, while the maritime imagination in contemporary literatures and other cultural forms has presented ways of responding to human migration, global neoliberalism and climate change. This series provides a forum for discussion of these and other maritime expressions, including enquiries that engage maritime and coastal zones as spaces that enable reflection on labour and leisure; racial terror and performances of freedom; environmental wonder and degradation; metaphor and materiality; and the various implications of globe, world and planet.

Article link: https://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article/11/1/216/138278/Toxic-BodiesTicks-Trans-Bodies-and-the-Ethics-of


Tracing ticks in two different artworks and Leslie Feinberg’s activist writing, I take my lead in this article from philosopher Donna Haraway and her suggestion to think about engagement with the environment through an “ethics of response-ability.” By deploying close readings, I will discuss the affects represented in the video installation Act on Instinct (2013) by Elin Magnusson, a sequence of the film Something Must Break (2014) by Ester Martin Bergsmark, and blog entries from the “Lyme Series” by the late trans activist Leslie Feinberg. Through these works, I explore the meaning of this correlation between ticks and transing bodies for environmental ethics as well as for the forging of livable lives for trans people. Toxicity surfaces as a link in these works. The notion of feminist figuration, developed by philosopher Rosi Braidotti among others, allows me to discuss toxicity as a material-discursive figuration, which highlights how human societies in a western context approach the body of the Other, in this case the transgender body as a human-Other and the tick as animal-Other. As a figuration, toxicity then becomes a shared meeting site that helps to problematize the western pathologization of trans bodies and asks what ethics emerge in this proximity between ticks and trans bodies. Toxicity exists in the discussed works in particular as a complex material-discursive trajectory. Although some discourses on toxicity uphold social hierarchies and racist assumptions, as illustrated by Mel Y. Chen, for example, the works here seem to reappropriate the status of the toxic body as a strategy for adjustment and alliance and a site of ethical engagement with the world. The tick will be my guide in weaving together stories of different bodies and of what Deborah Bird Rose and Thom van Dooren call the “unloved other.”

This book sets forth a new research agenda for climate theory and aesthetics for the age of the Anthropocene. It explores the challenge of representing and conceptualizing climate in the era of climate change.　

In the Anthropocene when geologic conditions and processes are primarily shaped by human activity, climate indicates not only atmospheric forces but the gamut of human activity that shape these forces. It includes the fuels we use, the lifestyles we cultivate, the industrial infrastructures and supply chains we build, and together these point to the possible futures we may encounter. This book demonstrates how every weather event constitutes the climatic forces that are as much social, cultural, and economic as they are environmental, natural, and physical. By foregrounding this fundamental insight, it intervenes in the well-established political and scientific discourses of climate change by identifying and exploring emergent aesthetic practices and the conceptual project of mediating the various forces embedded in climate.　

This book is the first to sustain a theoretical and analytical engagement with the category of realism in the context of anthropogenic climate change, to capture climate’s capacity to express embedded histories, and to map the formal strategies of representation that have turned climate into cultural content.

Part 1. The Climate of Representation

1. Ecological Postures for a Climate Realism

Amanda Boetzkes

2. Anthropocene Arts: Apocalyptic Realism and the Post-Oil Imaginary in the Niger Delta

Philip Aghoghovwia

3. Fire, Water, Moon: Supplemental Seasons in a Time without Season

Anne-Lise François

Part 2. The Subject of Climate

4. Indigenous Realism and Climate Change

Kyle Powys Whyte

5. Realism’s Phantom Subjects

M. Ty

6. Geologic Realism: On the Beach of Geologic Time

Kathryn Yusoff

Part 3. Realism and the Critique of Climate, or Climate and the Critique of Realism

7. The Poetics of Geopower: Climate Change and the Politics of Representation

Ingrid Diran and Antoine Traisnel

8. Perplexing Realities: Practicing Relativism in the Anthropocene

Barbara Herrnstein Smith

Secondo alcuni studiosi siamo entrati in una nuova era geologica, l'Antropocene, segnata dal dominio degli umani sull'intero pianeta. Questo libro propone una lettura diversa della nostra crisi socio-ecologica; invece che di Antropocene, bisognerebbe parlare di Wasteocene (dall'inglese waste, scarto), ovvero di un'epoca segnata dalla continua produzione di persone, comunità e luoghi di scarto. L'imposizione di relazioni socio-ecologiche che producono comunità umane e non umane di scarto implica la costruzione di ecologie tossiche fatte di sostanze e narrazioni contaminanti. In un viaggio tra Napoli e Agbogbloshie, in Ghana, tra fantascienza ed epidemie, Marco Armiero porterà i lettori nelle viscere del Wasteocene, ma indicherà anche le esperienze di resistenza che lo stanno smantellando.

The Oceanic Turn: We are witnessing an interdisciplinary transition to what might be called " critical ocean studies " that reflects an important shift from a long-term concern with mobility across transoceanic surfaces to theorizing oceanic submersion, thus rendering vast oceanic space into ontological place. This has much to do with a new oceanic imaginary emerging in the wake of the knowledge of anthropogenic climate change and sea-level rise. This turn to ontologies of the sea and its multispe-cies engagements are the focus of this paper, particularly their implications for temporality and aesthetics in the Anthropocene. The oceanic turn of the twentieth century issued from geopolitics as well as new interdisciplinary groupings in the humanities and social sciences. It can be traced to the 1945 Truman Proclamation — the most significant, and yet largely unre-marked, twentieth-century remapping of the globe — which extended U.S. territory to include a two-hundred nautical mile Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) (see DeLoughrey, Routes). This created a scramble for the oceans, catalyzing EEZ declarations by nations all over the world and a U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea that effectively remapped seventy percent of the planet. Although largely unnoticed by new disciplinary groupings such as the " Blue Humanities " (Mentz), Cold War geopolitics had a decisive influence in configuring a new understanding of the terraqueous globe. The second catalyst for the rise of critical ocean studies was the post-1970s " spatial turn, " which led to the emergence of globalization and diaspora studies. Marx-ist geography was integral to defining the post-Fordist era of global capitalism and relations of labor to space. This loosening of nationally-bounded modes of thinking about capital and space led to an unprecedented number of transoceanic studies, notably the work of Marcus Rediker, which helped to inspire Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic, a text that inaugurated a new generation of thinking about race in transoceanic ways.

A common ground is emerging for social and cultural studies of design. Design history is exploring the socially constructed and networked nature of our material surroundings; at the same time, STS is investigating design as the interface between humans and technology. This common ground is particularly interesting where it intersects with the rapidly growing fields of environmental history and environmental humanities. Today, environmental concerns, especially issues of sustainability, are essential parameters in all design practices. However, this ‘green revolution’ is a glaringly white spot on the design historical map, still awaiting its scholarly historicization. Historical understanding of, and critical reflection on, the rise of sustainability as the primordial trope in design discourse is essential to building a solid knowledge base and to underpin present and future decision-making. This article will argue for the urgency of charting this terrain, and call for design history, design studies, STS and environmental history to join forces in the pioneering efforts at studying histories of sustainable design.

ABSTRACT: Anthropocentrism has been claimed to be the root of the global environmental crisis. Based on a multidisciplinary (e.g. environmental philosophy, animal ethics, anthro - pology, law) and multilingual (English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese) literature review, this article proposes a conceptual analysis of ‘anthropocentrism’ and reconstructs the often implicit argument that links anthropocentrism to the environmental crisis. The variety of usages of the concept of ‘anthropocentrism’ described in this article reveals many underlying disagreements under the apparent unanimity of the calls to reject anthropocentrism, both regarding what exactly is the root of the problem, and the nature of the possible solutions. It highlights the limitations of the argument of anthropocentrism as the scapegoat of the environmental crisis and identifies two main challenges faced by attempts to go beyond anthropocentrism: an epistemological challenge regarding knowledge and the place of sciences, and a metaethical challenge related to values and cultural pluralism. Beyond the issue of an anthropocentric point of view, the core of the problem might be an intertwinement of views and as sumptions that work together to undermine attempts to protect the environment from the greed of some humans, such as the human−nature dichotomy, capitalism, consumerism, industrialism, etc. Finally, this article suggests that making the nuances and the presuppositions that underlie various versions of the anti-anthropocentric rhetoric explicit is necessary to foster constructive dialogue among different anti anthropocentrism proponents, as well as with their detractors.
KEY WORDS: Anthropocentrism · Non-anthropocentrism · Values of nature · Environmental ethics · Cultural pluralism · Intrinsic value

Blue Legalities is inspired by the emerging blue turn in social sciences and the humanities about oceans and their inhabitants. But as important and compelling as this blue turn has been, it has yet to substantively and creatively take up questions of ocean law and governance. Specifically, increasing concerns around warming temperatures, increased pollution, sea level rise, ocean acidification, bio-harvesting, and deep-sea and sand mining are driving regulatory changes and raising questions about the nature of territory, sovereignty, and long-established claims in international law. The rapid technological and ecological transformations that have taken place over the past few decades are now altering the ways that the seas are governed, suggesting an urgent need for more critical attention to the laws of the seas, in their broadest and most pluralistic articulations. Blue Legalities offers such an intensified analysis, focusing on the ways in which our political frameworks and legal infrastructures have been made, contested, and are currently being remade in the oceans.

Thinking posthumanly – from a post-Enlightenment, critical, new materialist perspective – things, including concepts, become more permeable and topological – they leak and stretch. Freed from limiting notions of agency, things behave. Rivers have established the same legal rights as humans in New Zealand  and India,  stones have been reported slithering across the desert floor in California,  an electrical power grid in the USA has revealed a unique agential dexterity  and walls have been spotted walking over mountains in the UK’s Lake District.  Thinking with a posthuman partiality, we begin to witness a democracy of objects rather than an anthropocentric dictatorship over inorganic materials. If agency is reworked into an ‘enactment’ as opposed to something that is ‘held’,  conceivably humans and other biological organisms are not necessary for agency (or life) to emerge as inorganic material agency erupts from unchoreographed assemblages of spacetimematter(ing). And if cognitive and dermatological boundaries are no longer organ-ised by an Enlightenment prescription, how might pedagogies perform differently and more equitably?
This article draws on the empirical materials from two psychogeographic walks that agitate lithic spaces with a posthuman affection. Part One examples a radical mobile classroom that I undertake regularly with university students where the use of it-narratives exposes the distributed agency of buildings. I explore what a posthuman gaze might do to/for performative pedagogies as my students attempt to interview a building. Part Two offers an example from my previous post-qualitative PhD inquiry which – by manipulating the practices of psychogeography and schizocartography – highlights how a shopping centre assemblage called Liverpool ONE diagnosed itself with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), thus reinforcing the notion of inorganic agential distribution. The pedagogic implications of this posthuman diagnosis are discussed.

For a culture defined by pervasive mediation and unceasing circulation of images, the invisibility of climate change, especially as it relates to the dark bed of the oceans, is unnerving. The oceans are persistently screened: as the human inability to envision large-scale geo-logical politics is laid bare, we are surrounded by ever more innovative machinic eyes. While singular disasters related to climate change produce news events, the ongoing pollution of the oceans does not qualify for live coverage. Is it not surprising that visual culture - from mainstream disaster movies to activist artworks - has taken it upon itself to fill this vacant space of attention. Taking as my case study sculptural installations by Jason deCaires Tylor, which can be viewed underwater or on a screen, in this paper, I theorise a ‘blue’ type of mediation, arguing that durational decay is a trait of oceanic media in the climate change era. This temporal decomposition links blue media to drowned histories that underwrite the Anthropocene, particularly the transatlantic slave trade and the Caribbean aesthetics, where the Atlantic figures as an unmarked grave site. Referring to the work of Zylinska and Kember as well as Väliaho, I argue that as the ocean is increasingly defined by death, the mediation of life becomes necessary in the absence of a live climate change event. Blue media perform their disappearance, thus recalling other disappearances of life in the waters, while they also participate in the neoliberal imperative to capture the productive capacities of life. In their aesthetic decomposition, where disappearance could be revelatory of history, blue media simultaneously perpetuate their own image. These attempts to halt death and decomposition by manipulating its digital referent speak to a larger anxiety as to the finitude of the human, which nevertheless cannot evade its own capture within the neoliberal logic of production.

These are notes and passages that I prepared for a presentation for the yearlong, graduate-directed Inter-UC EcoMaterialisms Collective. The presentation was during the winter quarter of 2016, and covered Hans Zinsser’s Rats, Lice and History (1935) and William Hardy McNeill’s Plagues and People (1976).

Decentralisation facilitates participation and helps deepen democracy. Nevertheless, it has been confronted with diverse challenges in Lesotho. First, the process has not succeeded to improve participation relative to the traditional system that preceded it. Second, it pitted the chiefs against counsellors. Third, it is hampered by lack of financial resources, human resources and the central government's tendency to intrude in local government's affairs and dictate the course of action. However, the prospects demonstrate that there ispolitical will to decentralise although there is still need to addresssome challenges. Firstly, the central government has to devolve financial powers to the local units.Secondly, it has to ensure a smooth relationship between counsellors and chiefs and continue augmenting the budget allocated to the local government. Finally, it has to promote the use of internet technology and consider making chieftainship the last sub-unit of the local government.

Inspired by Felix Guattari's Three Ecologies ([1989] 2000), this article explores recent Orkney literature with an environmental focus (Working the Map-ed. J & F Cumming and M. MacInnes; Ebban an' Flowan-Finlay, A., Watts, L. and Peebles, A.; The Outrun-A. Liptrot; Swimming With Seals-V. Whitworth) in terms of Orkney ecologies-which are always personal, environmental and cultural. Informed by fieldwork carried out in Orkney, looking at discourse around the development of marine renewable energy in the islands, it argues for the use of ecological dialogism, an approach to language and communication which recognises meaning-making as embodied and emergent within a meshwork (Ingold 2011) of lived experience. It explores the texts as part of an ecology of meaning-making within the naturalcultural (Haraway 2007) world, in which environment, social relations and human subjectivity are inextricably entangled. In this view, literary texts can be approached, not as isolated examples of individual creative expression, but as moments of emergent meaning-making in the dialogue between individual, cultural and environmental ecologies, reaching beyond the page into a living meshwork, where we can think in terms of 'Ecology as Text, Text as Ecology' (Morton 2010). These Orkney ecologies entangle the natural, personal, cultural and technological, through and as, stories, emphasising interdependence and care for both human and more-than-human relationships. Such moments of connection offer hope of new narrative possibilities with which to face the uncertainty of an Anthropocene future.

Engaging with beauty can orient mind, heart and action in this era of ecological destruction. First, I present a vision of beauty that acknowledges some of its common critiques while salvaging it from claims that it is merely subjective, or worse, destructive. I then focus on how the ecological crisis elicits and invites participation in actions towards vulnerable things and the beauty they invoke. I reflect on my life experiences and engagements with art to help understand the possibilities and power in the beauty of vulnerable things and of actions towards them. While I acknowledge and address some difficulties with beauty as the basis for action, I suggest it is better suited to engage the ecological crisis than appealing to emotions such as hope or relying on prevalent ethical approaches. I end the paper by considering the transformative role aesthetics should play in reimagining subject focus, interdisciplinarity and character development in school curricula and pedagogy aimed at sustainability.

This paper explores interdisciplinary teaching methods that combine studies in the humanities (particularly literature and philosophy) with multisensory environmental experience (outdoor fieldwork and reflection). While various forms of outdoor practice are already familiar in environmental humanities education, I emphasize their role as a powerful tool for examining rationalist traditions that trivialize embodied experience and estrange our intelligence from the intimacies and enigmas of everyday contact with nonhuman nature. Drawing directly from student reflections in environmental humanities courses at the University of Washington Bothell, I illustrate ways that undergraduates apply insights from phenomenology and literary studies to trace connections between ordinary sensory experience, contemporary and historical environmental values, and the literary and philosophical traditions that inform them. Through this integrated approach, students also develop awareness of the ethical implications of sense experiences we share with other forms of life, and draw on their embodied encounters to critique Cartesian legacies that privilege logical abstractions at the expense of other ways of knowing.

Neither Jean Rhys' 'Unfinished Autobiography', Smile Please, nor Elise Aylen's The Night of the Lord fits neatly into these paradigmatic post-colonial patterns even though the journeys they inscribe are also generated out of colonial/postcolonial circumstances. Both authors thematise the journey and the significance of writing in relation to journeying, and both base their accounts on earlier journals each wrote. Rhys' 'passage to England' is both literal and figurative; and although she spent most of her adult life there after a childhood in Dominica, her autobiographical and imaginative writings reveal her alienation from both white English society and, (to her sorrow), that of black Creoles in Dominica. Rhys' writing about England and the Caribbean, however, like the classic settler-colonial journey of indigenisation, facilitates her life-long desire to identify with the black Caribbean rather than her 'ancestral' England. By contrast, Elise Aylen uses an account of a journey-in this case a pilgrimage, not to the imperial centre, but to another British ex-colony, India-to identify with India rather than with  her country of birth, Canada.

Climate is an enduring idea of the human mind and also a powerful one; and, like any interesting word, it defies easy definition.  The idea of climate today is most commonly associated with the discourse of climate change and its scientific, political, economic, religious, ethical and social dimensions.  Before we can understand the cultural politics of climate change, I believe we need a richer understanding of the idea of climate itself.  My argument is that climate -- as it is imagined and acted upon -- needs to be understood, first and foremost, culturally and that the environmental humanities can enrich and deepen such an understanding.

This 5-part series of articles  (written as an undergraduate major in Philosophy and Government) at the College of William and Mary) is the first major study of the animal rights and animal liberation movement that was fully emerging in the United States.  It examines the organization, structure, goals, and ideas of those working to protect non-human animals.  (Note: unpublished but also available upon request from the author or though the library at the College of William and Mary—and a separate part of this work— is an original theory and analysis of "Inter-specific Justice" (i.e., for both human and non-human animals).

Briar March’s award-winning documentary There Once Was an Island chronicles the lives of the Polynesian inhabitants of Takuu, a small atoll in the Pacific, who are faced with the gradual submersion of their home due to sea level rise.  Applying Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence” to the ecological and political processes shown in the film, the chapter argues that March’s documentary is a eco-cosmopolitan project reaching out to new forms of solidarity.

Spannungsverhältnisse zwischen Natur und Mensch prägen unseren Alltag, unsere Sprache und öffentliche Diskurse im Themenspektrum der Nachhaltigkeit. Letztere entfaltet normatives Potential, steht bildungs- und wirtschaftspolitisch im Zentrum und bildet sich in der Literatur ab. Natur, Umwelt und Nachhaltigkeit sind Themen, die viele Wissensdomänen berühren – von naturwissenschaftlichen Fragen über rechtliche Aspekte bis zu Überlegungen der Sprachkritik. Sie bedürfen einer Betrachtung aus verschiedensten Fachdisziplinen, wie es etwa auch im Rahmen der Environmental Humanities gefordert wird. Um in diesem Zuge die Relevanz sprachbezogener Zugänge und Wissenschaften zu stärken, führt dieser Band Perspektiven der Literaturwissenschaft, Didaktik, BNE, Human Animal Studies, Geschichte, Philosophie usw. mit Beiträgen aus verschiedenen neueren und auch traditionellen linguistischen Teilbereichen zusammen, wie beispielsweise der Ökolinguistik, der Diskurslinguistik oder der Nachhaltigkeitskommunikation. Der Band eröffnet somit für Wissenschaftler*innen aus Linguistik und anderen Fachdisziplinen sowie für interessierte Lehrkräfte Einblicke in interdisziplinäre Zugänge zu sprachlichen Perspektiven auf Nachhaltigkeit.

Note to reader Moving in the company of Curtis L. Francisco, this chapter documents the partially remediated Jackpile-Paguate Uranium Mine, registering how radioactive reservoirs, eroding slopes, or radon-emitting walls both weigh upon pueblo communities, plants, and animal others, and shape engagement, mood, conversation. To encompass an erstwhile uranium mine from a comfortable distance with maps or satellite photography (as if that were even possible) seems to me to ignore or dismiss the debt that all who live in zones of nuclear-energized comfort owe to those humans and nonhumans who struggle with the radioactive consequences of our lifestyles. Therefore, the mode of writing embraced here is chosen for how it confronts this dark object, opening an intimate path through that which dwarves us, allowing it to suggest something of itself over the course of the encounter, while witnessing how others live with it. What is here presented as a single journey was recorded and compiled over three separate outings at the invitation of Francisco, an indigenous geologist and resident of the Laguna Pueblo, for the purpose of bringing this story to people's attention.

The lack of adherence to treatment is considered in general, to be higher than 50%. Given the magnitude of the problem, it is sought to detect it and solve it through various methods-of which, there are few studies and publications regarding the "climate of trust." In these, the patient expresses the genuine truth of the lack of adherence, and even of intentional noncompliance. That is to say, they express their pharmacotherapeutic experience; which will allow the healthcare professional, not only to agree on the appropriate treatment for the patient, but to rebuild it. Two of the first cases are exposed when establishing the "climate of trust," in the social-pharmaceutical context, in a pharmacy office; because of the unexpected and shocking with what was expected by the pharmacist.

Relationships between Greenlandic hunters and their huskies in northwestern Greenland are shaped by a history of working together and of mutually surviving.  A strong understanding of the roles each plays and their place within the relationship enables both the dogs and the hunters to negotiate the perils of the Greenland ice cap, the unpredictable weather conditions and the threat of predators, while at the same time facilitating the hunting of land and sea mammals for their meat and fur.  However, the effects of under-regulated hunting practices and climate change can be seen to have brought about dramatic reductions in land and sea mammal numbers, and a reduced capacity and opportunity to hunt. This in turn has adversely affected the lives of Greenlandic huskies, bringing the question of how these animals are valued into sharper focus. This paper examines accounts and representations of hunters, huskies, hunting and dogsledding in Greenland, in considering this question.

In recent years, there has been a rethinking of the role of disturbance regimes in nature conservation: from exceptional and destructive events to be controlled and/or avoided, to key ecological processes to be nurtured and choreographed. These regimes concern the spatiotemporal dynamics of ecological disturbances, understood here as events that disrupt the structure of an ecology, community or population, causing profound changes in an ecosystem. The rethinking of their role precedes but resonates with current enthusiasms for proactive and experimental modes of conservation, such as rewilding.
This thesis draws on three case studies (the New Forest, Knepp Castle Estate and Dundreggan Estate) to explore the ontological, epistemic and socio-political implications of rewilding for the governance of forest disturbance regimes in the UK, particularly through the use of large herbivores. Drawing upon relational understandings of nature, space and time, it develops an understanding of disturbance regimes as process and practice. It first examines how rewilding departs from orthodox biopolitical modes of governing life and the ontological politics at the interface between these various modes. To this end, it attends to the ways in which disturbances have been historically understood and how these understandings have come to shape their governance. Second, it explores the knowledge practices through which ecologists and forest managers know and enact disturbances, comparing a traditional ‘prescriptive’ approach with rewilding. It argues that in practice rewilding is multiple, in contrast to rewilding discourse. Finally, it maps the different and sometimes conflicting social, economic and cultural values associated with working with natural processes, exploring the political ecologies of governing disturbance regimes. It argues that controversies around forest management pertain to a large extent to contrasting perceptions of different types of ‘work’ within the idea of working landscape and how they are ‘naturalised’.
In the conclusion, the thesis explores three empirical and conceptual contributions of these findings for those seeking to understand the logics of rewilding and the processes, practices and dynamics by which nonhuman forms and processes are governed in a post-Natural and uncertain future. First, by deploying a relational approach to the governance of disturbance regimes and by focusing on a long-term disturbance, I draw out the relevance of temporality for thinking through and with disturbances as social and ecological processes. Second, by drawing attention to the intertwining of bio- and socio-political regimes, I propose a reframing of (European) rewilded landscapes as working landscapes. Finally, by attending to the intricacies of practice, I argue that rewilding praxis is multiple and hybrid. It often involves compromises and is shaped by past governance histories and the broader political and social context.

Firstly, I want to establish the importance of animals and the question of the species boundary in 'othering' and racism. Secondly, I offer three (not mutually exclusive) kinds of political (and/or) popular objections that have been raisted against considering animals and speciesism - that is, some of the political difficulties involved in pursuing this topic in post-colonial contexts. Thirdly, I focus on the question of representation, and the ways in which two post-colonial writers from Canada and Australia have tackled the issue of the species boundary and speciesism. I am concerned with both the animal and animalistic, that is, with actual animals and the Western human symbolic economies within which they are more or less forced to more or less exits.