essential reading for Ecology in a Time of Planetary Crisis

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Elizabeth Allison

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Dec 17, 2019, 4:21:31 PM12/17/19
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Many thanks to all who responded to my query with so much exciting reading for my students!

I posed the same query to the AESS list, and have pasted below the synthesized list of recommendations I received (in no particular order), and attached my syllabus to this email.

Happy holidays!
Elizabeth Allison, PhD
CIIS
San Francisco, CA

Rambunctious Garden or something else from the re-wilding movement would be great...

Here is a link to a very good article in the Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/30/anthropocene-epoch-have-we-entered-a-new-phase-of-planetary-history

Erle Ellis' little book Anthropocene: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford Press) is very inexpensive and very good.  

Steffen, W., Broadgate, W., Deutsch, L., Gaffney, O. & Ludwig, C. The trajectory of the Anthropocene: the Great Acceleration. Anthr. Rev2, 81–98 (2015).

Liu, J. et al. Systems integration for global sustainability. Science 347, 1258832 (2015).

(Liu's work on telecoupling is really important)

Lastly, there is a website I built to accompany my class that you may find useful  https://theanthropocenedashboard.com

Nystrom, M. et al. 2019. Anatomy and resilience of the global production ecosystem. Nature 575: 98-108.

Lovins, Amory B. et al. 2019. Recalibrating climate prospects.  Environmental Research Letters 14https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ab55ab

Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, by Roy Scranton

Dahr Jamail's The End of Ice

  • while neither new nor per se ecologically oriented I find it worthwhile entertaining Kwame Anthony Appiah's "Honor Code" (2010), i.e. applying his concept of "moral revolutions" to the climate crisis, the inacceptability of burning fossil fuels as a prospective societal driver of decarbonization..
  • I've been wondering whether Mark Lynas might come around to revisit and update his "Six Degrees" (2007) in view of recent IPCC reports and, indeed, special reports (apparently not yet...)
  • a more obvious, albeit less "catchy" read could be Oran Young's attempt to invoke "social capital for the Anthropocene" (Governing complex systems, 2017)

 

Clive Hamilton. Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene. Polity, 2017.

Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann. Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future. Verso, 2018.

Frank Fischer. Climate Crisis and the Democratic Prospect: Participatory Governance in Sustainable

Communities. Oxford University Press, 2017.

Bruno Latour. Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime. Polity Press, 2018.

Roy Scranton (2015) Learning to die in the Anthropocene: reflections on the end of a civilization, San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books.

Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone (2012) Active hope: how to face the mess we're in without going crazy, Novato, Calif.: New World Library.

Charles Eisenstein, Climate:  A New Story

Buck, Holly Jean. 2019. After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration. London: Verso. (one of the most original thinkers on geoengineering currently)

Büscher, Bram and Robert Fletcher. 2019. The Conservation Revolution Radical Ideas for Saving Nature Beyond the Anthropocene. London: Verso.

Dunlap, Alexander and Jostein Jakobsen. 2019. The Violent Technologies of Extraction: Political Ecology, Critical Agrarian Studies and the Capitalist Worldeater. London: Palgrave Macmillan. (short and very provocative...)

Bhavnani, Kum-Kum, John Foran, Priya Kurian, and Debashish Munshi, eds. 2019. Climate Futures: Reimagining Global Climate Justice. London: Zed Books.

If you're interested in Indigenous perspectives:

Gilio-Whitaker, Dina. 2019. As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice from Colonization to Standing Rock. Boston: Beacon Press.

Norgaard, Kari Marie. 2019. Salmon and Acorns Feed Our People. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

And Naomi Klein has a new book on the Green New Deal, an easy read that's very much grounded in current struggles... (I don't have the reference handy).

Ekins, P. and J. Gupta (2019). "Perspective: a healthy planet for healthy people." Global Sustainability 2: e20.

IPBES (2019). Global assessment report on biodiversity and ecosystem services of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. Bonn, Germany, (Eds) E. S. Brondizio, J. Settele, S. Díaz, and H. T. Ngo. IPBES Secretariat.

UN Environment (2019). Global Environment Outlook – GEO-6: Healthy Planet, Healthy People. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Schlosberg, David and Craven, Luke (2019). Sustainable Materialism: Environmental Movements and the Politics of Everyday Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.  https://global.oup.com/academic/product/sustainable-materialism-9780198841500?cc=au&lang=en&

Dryzek, John S and Pickering, Jonathan (2019). The Politics of the Anthropocene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-politics-of-the-anthropocene-9780198809623?cc=au&lang=en&

Pope Francis's 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si’ 

Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass

Extinction Rebellion Movement’s book This is Not a Drill

Greta Thunberg’s collection of speeches, No One Is too Small to Make a Difference

Eileen Crist’s Abundant Earth: Toward an Ecological Civilization

Half Earth by E.O Wilson

The living planet report 

Drawdown

The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles Mann

 

 

 
PAR 6079_ETPC_sp20_draft.pdf

jps...@gmail.com

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Dec 17, 2019, 8:15:10 PM12/17/19
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Thanks for sharing the compiled list, Elizabeth, it will be useful to me.

Just noting, it's surprising how few contributions by women and non-white folks are listed...

Happy break,

JP


Le 19-12-17 à 17 h 21, 'Elizabeth Allison' via gep-ed a écrit :
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