Environmental Apocalypse in Science and Art PDF Download

Author: Sergio Fava
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415634016
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
Why are climate mitigation and adaptation failing? This book situates climate policy in the cultural history of future-prediction practices. Tracing relations between modelling, epistemology, politics, food security, religion, art and the apocalyptic, its case studies examine how different modes of representing nature and imagining futures are catalysts or obstacles for immediate action.

Author: Sergio Fava
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136208933
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
At a time when it is clear that climate change adaptation and mitigation are failing, this book examines how our assumptions about (valid and usable) knowledge are preventing effective climate action. Through a cross-disciplinary, empirically-based analysis of climate science and policy, the book situates the failures of climate policy in the cultural history of prediction and its interfaces with policy. Fava calls into question the current interfaces between scientific research and climate policy by tracing multiple connections between modelling, epistemology, politics, food security, religion, art, and the apocalyptic. Demonstrating how the current domination of climate policy by models and scenarios is part of the problem, the book examines how artistic practices are a critical location to ask questions differently, rethink environmental futures, and activate social change. The analysis starts with another moment of climatic change in recent western history: the overlap of the Little Ice Age and the "scientific revolution," during which intense climatic, scientific and political change were contemporary with mathematical calculation of the apocalypse. Dealing with the need for complex answers to complex and urgent questions, this is essential reading for those interested in climate action, interdisciplinary research and methodological innovation. The empirical analyses amount to a methodological experiment, across history of science, theology, art theory and history, architecture, future studies, climatology, computer modelling, and agricultural policy. This book is a major contribution to understanding how we are precluding effective climate action, and designing futures that resemble our worst nightmares.

Author: Joanna Page
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 178735976X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Projects that bring the ‘hard’ sciences into art are increasingly being exhibited in galleries and museums across the world. In a surge of publications on the subject, few focus on regions beyond Europe and the Anglophone world. Decolonizing Science in Latin American Art assembles a new corpus of art-science projects by Latin American artists, ranging from big-budget collaborations with NASA and MIT to homegrown experiments in artists’ kitchens. While they draw on recent scientific research, these art projects also ‘decolonize’ science. If increasing knowledge of the natural world has often gone hand-in-hand with our objectification and exploitation of it, the artists studied here emphasize the subjectivity and intelligence of other species, staging new forms of collaboration and co-creativity beyond the human. They design technologies that work with organic processes to promote the health of ecosystems, and seek alternatives to the logics of extractivism and monoculture farming that have caused extensive ecological damage in Latin America. They develop do-it-yourself, open-source, commons-based practices for sharing creative and intellectual property. They establish critical dialogues between Western science and indigenous thought, reconnecting a disembedded, abstracted form of knowledge with the cultural, social, spiritual, and ethical spheres of experience from which it has often been excluded. Decolonizing Science in Latin American Art interrogates how artistic practices may communicate, extend, supplement, and challenge scientific ideas. At the same time, it explores broader questions in the field of art, including the relationship between knowledge, care, and curation; nonhuman agency; art and utility; and changing approaches to participation. It also highlights important contributions by Latin American thinkers to themes of global significance, including the Anthropocene, climate change and environmental justice.

Author: Michael Shellenberger
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0063001705
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
Now a National Bestseller! Climate change is real but it’s not the end of the world. It is not even our most serious environmental problem. Michael Shellenberger has been fighting for a greener planet for decades. He helped save the world’s last unprotected redwoods. He co-created the predecessor to today’s Green New Deal. And he led a successful effort by climate scientists and activists to keep nuclear plants operating, preventing a spike of emissions. But in 2019, as some claimed “billions of people are going to die,” contributing to rising anxiety, including among adolescents, Shellenberger decided that, as a lifelong environmental activist, leading energy expert, and father of a teenage daughter, he needed to speak out to separate science from fiction. Despite decades of news media attention, many remain ignorant of basic facts. Carbon emissions peaked and have been declining in most developed nations for over a decade. Deaths from extreme weather, even in poor nations, declined 80 percent over the last four decades. And the risk of Earth warming to very high temperatures is increasingly unlikely thanks to slowing population growth and abundant natural gas. Curiously, the people who are the most alarmist about the problems also tend to oppose the obvious solutions. What’s really behind the rise of apocalyptic environmentalism? There are powerful financial interests. There are desires for status and power. But most of all there is a desire among supposedly secular people for transcendence. This spiritual impulse can be natural and healthy. But in preaching fear without love, and guilt without redemption, the new religion is failing to satisfy our deepest psychological and existential needs.

Author: Chris Begley
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1541675274
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
In this insightful book, an underwater archaeologist and survival coach shows how understanding the collapse of civilizations can help us prepare for a troubled future. Pandemic, climate change, or war: our era is ripe with the odor of doomsday. In movies, books, and more, our imaginations run wild with visions of dreadful, abandoned cities and returning to the land in a desperate attempt at survival. In The Next Apocalypse, archaeologist Chris Begley argues that we completely misunderstand how disaster works. Examining past collapses of civilizations, such as the Maya and Rome, he argues that these breakdowns are actually less about cataclysmic destruction than they are about long processes of change. In short: it’s what happens after the initial uproar that matters. Some people abandon their homes and neighbors; others band together to start anew. As we anticipate our own fate, Begley tells us that it was communities, not lone heroes, who survived past apocalypses—and who will survive the next. Fusing archaeology, survivalism, and social criticism, The Next Apocalypse is an essential read for anxious times.

Author: John Hay
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316997421
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 590

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Book Description
The idea of America has always encouraged apocalyptic visions. The 'American Dream' has not only imagined the prospect of material prosperity; it has also imagined the end of the world. 'Final forecasts' constitute one of America's oldest literary genres, extending from the eschatological theology of the New England Puritans to the revolutionary discourse of the early republic, the emancipatory rhetoric of the Civil War, the anxious fantasies of the atomic age, and the doomsday digital media of today. For those studying the history of America, renditions of the apocalypse are simply unavoidable. This book brings together two dozen essays by prominent scholars that explore the meanings of apocalypse across different periods, regions, genres, registers, modes, and traditions of American literature and culture. It locates the logic and rhetoric of apocalypse at the very core of American literary history.

Author: Hauke Riesch
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000390462
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
Linking literature from the sociological study of the apocalyptic with the sociology and philosophy of science, Apocalyptic Narratives explores how the apocalyptic narrative frames and provides meaning to contemporary, secular and scientific crises focussing on nuclear war, general environmental crisis and climate change in both English- and German-speaking cultural contexts. In particular, the book will use social identity and representation theories, the sociologies of risk and Lakatos’ philosophy of science to trace how our cultural background and apocalyptic tradition shape our wider interpretation, communication and response to contemporary global crisis. The set of environmental and other challenges that the world is facing is often framed in terms of apocalyptic or existential crisis. Yet apocalyptic fears about the near future are nothing new. This book looks at the narrative connections between our current sense of crisis and the apocalyptic. The book will be of interest to readers interested in environmental crisis and communication, the sociology and philosophy of science, and existential risk, but also to readers interested in the apocalyptic and its contemporary relevance.

Author: Isabel Cristina Pinedo
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438416164
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
In Recreational Terror, Isabel Cristina Pinedo analyzes how the contemporary horror film produces recreational terror as a pleasurable encounter with violence and danger for female spectators. She challenges the conventional wisdom that violent horror films can only degrade women and incite violence, and contends instead that the contemporary horror film speaks to the cultural need to express rage and terror in the midst of social upheaval.

Author: Jonathan Franzen
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
ISBN: 0008434050
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 80

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Book Description
The climate change is coming. To prepare for it, we need to admit that we can’t prevent it.

Author: Tore Størvold
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 081950050X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
During the past three decades, Iceland has attained a strong presence in the world through its musical culture, with images of the nation being packaged and shipped out in melodies, harmonies, and rhythms. What 'Iceland' means for people, both at home and abroad, is conditioned by music and its ability to animate notions of nature and nationality. In six chapters that range from discussions of indie rock ballads to 'Nordic noir' television music, Dissonant Landscapes describes the capacity of musical expression to transform ideas about nature and nationality on the northern edges of Europe.