Green Statehood and Environmental Crisis

2006 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 101-108
Author(s):  
John Vogler
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Crisis

The Political and Aesthetic Power of the Everyday in Beckett's Happy Days

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-66
Author(s):  
Julie Bates
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
First Century ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Algerian War ◽  
Material Resources ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The Last Man ◽  
Second World

Happy Days is contemporaneous with a number of seminal contributions to the concept of the everyday in postwar France. This essay suggests that the increasingly constrained verbal and physical routines performed by its protagonist Winnie constitute a portrait of the everyday, and goes on to trace the affinities between Beckett's portrait and several formulations of the concept, with particular emphasis on the pronounced gendering of the everyday in many of these theories. The essay suggests the aerial bombings of the Second World War and methods of torture during the Algerian War as potential influences for Beckett's play, and draws a comparison with Marlen Haushofer's 1963 novel The Wall, which reimagines the Romantic myth of The Last Man as The Last Woman. It is significant, however, that the cataclysmic event that precedes the events of Happy Days remains unnamed. This lack of specificity, I suggest, is constitutive of the menace of the play, and has ensured that the political as well as aesthetic power of Happy Days has not dated. Indeed, the everyday of its sentinel figure posted in a blighted landscape continues to articulate the fears of audiences, for whom the play may resonate today as a staging of twenty-first century anxiety about environmental crisis. The essay concludes that in Happy Days we encounter an isolated female protagonist who contrives from scant material resources and habitual bodily rhythms a shelter within a hostile environment, who generates, in other words, an everyday despite the shattering of the social and temporal framework that conventionally underpin its formation. Beckett's play in this way demonstrates the political as well as aesthetic power of the everyday in a time of crisis.

A Scientific World-View of Nature and Environmental Problem with a Special Concentration on Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s Understanding of Environmental Sustainability (Perspektif Sains terhadap Krisis Alam dan Persekitaran: Pemikiran Seyyed Hossein Nasr tentan)

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 312-328
Author(s):  
Md. Abu Sayem
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Sustainability ◽  
World View ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Ecological Crisis ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
World Views ◽  
Renaissance Humanism ◽  
Spiritual World ◽  
Scientific World ◽  
European Renaissance

The present paper attempts to expose how the scientific world-view of nature contributes to the present environmental crisis. Alongside this, it relates European Renaissance, humanism, secularism, the scientific and industrial revolutions, modern philosophy, scientism, technology-based modern life, consumerism-based modern society, etc. with current environmental problems. By focusing on Nasr’s traditional understanding of nature, the paper explores how materialistic and mechanistic world-views are deeply connected with the present ecological crisis. It also offers a critical analysis of Nasr’s spiritual and religious world-view of nature and examines its relevance. In doing so, it aims to highlight some demerits of the present world-view, and to call to reform current perceptions of nature by revitalizing traditional wisdom in order to protect the environment from further degradation. Thus, the paper is scholarly addition to the ongoing discourse on the issue of religions and the environment. Keywords: Eco-theology, Environmental Degradation, Materialistic and Mechanistic Views of Nature, Scientism, Spiritual Crisis of Modern humans, Religious and Spiritual World-Views.   Abstrak Kertas kajian ini menerangkan bagaimana pandangan saintifik telah menyumbang kepada krisis alam sekitar semasa. Disamping itu, kertas ini akan menhubungkaitkan Gerakan Revolusi Humanisma di Eropah, sekularisme, revolusi  sains dan perindustrian, falsafah moden, saintisme, kehidupan moden yang berasaskan teknologi, masyarakat moden yang berasaskan consumerisme, etc. dengan krisis alam sekitar yang berlaku dewasa ini.  Dengan memahami pandangan Nasr terhadap alam sekitar, kertas ini akan merungkai bagaimana pandangan materialistik (kebendaan) dan mekanistik mempengaruhi krisis ekologi masa kini. Ia juga akan menganalisa pandangan spiritual dan agama Nasr terhadap alam sekitar secara kritikal dan akan menilai sejauh mana kesesuaiannya. Dengan sedemikian dapat menyedarkan manusia tentang kecacatan pandangan semasa, yang kemudiannya akan membawa kepada pembaharuan persepsi mereka terhadap alam sekitar dengan cara menghidupkan semula nilai-nilai tradisional demi mengelakkan kemerosotan alam sekitar. Kertas ini akan memuatkan idea-idea para cendiakawan dalam membincangkan isu  berkaitan agama dan alam sekitar. Kata Kunci: Eko-Teologi, Kemerosotan Alam Sekitar, Pandangan Materialistik dan Makanistik terhadap Alam, Saintisme, Krisis Spiritual Manusia Moden, Perspektif Spiritual dan Agama.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Mason
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
Communal Experience ◽  
In Christ ◽  
The Church ◽  
Francis Of Assisi

This chapter locates Rossetti in the context of the book’s ecotheological argument, which traces an ecological love command in her writing through her engagement with Tractarianism, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the Church Fathers, and Francis of Assisi. It establishes her Anglo-Catholic imagining of the cosmos as a fabric of participation and communal experience embodied in Christ. The first section reads Rossetti in the context of current Victorian ecocriticism, which underplays the role of Christianity in the development of nineteenth-century environmentalism. The next sections question critical readings of Rossetti as a reclusive thinker and argue instead for an educated and politicized Christian for whom indifference to the spiritual is complicit with an environmental crisis in which the weak and vulnerable suffer most. This introduction also refers to the wider field of Rossetti studies and introduces her reading of grace and apocalypse as a major contribution to the intradiscipline of Christianity and ecology.

Ecofeminist Biblical Hermeneutics for Cyborgs and the Story of Jezebel

2020 ◽  
pp. 295-311
Author(s):  
Arthur W. Walker-Jones
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Digital Humanities ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Biblical Hermeneutics ◽  
Biblical Story ◽  
Seminal Work ◽  
Feminist Interpretation ◽  
Digital Cultures

This chapter examines the Jezebel.com website as a feminist interpretation of the biblical story of Jezebel, in order to discuss the ways digital media make reading more transparent, intertextual, and holistic. Donna Haraway’s article “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” is a seminal work for both ecofeminism and the digital humanities. This articles uses her understanding of the cyborg and naturecultures to argue that Jezebel has become a cyborg online. Cyborgs and digital media could be used to reinforce the nature–culture dualism that is related to male–female dualism and has legitimated patriarchy and the environmental crisis. This chapter, therefore, argues that the identification of cyborg naturecultures in reading both the biblical stories and digital cultures is particularly important for ecofeminist approaches to the Hebrew Bible.

A Slow Unfolding “Fault Sequence”: Risk and Responsibility in Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-99
Author(s):  
Julia Hoydis
Keyword(s):  
Risk Management ◽  
Communication Theory ◽  
Risk Behaviour ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Environmental Destruction ◽  
Human Risk ◽  
Collective Risk ◽  
Aesthetic Form ◽  
Personal Crisis ◽  
Dramatic Text

AbstractBritish playwright Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children (2016) tackles the imaginative challenge of depicting environmental crisis, in particular the risks of nuclear destruction and climate change. With questions of intra- and intergenerational justice being at the heart of the dramatic text, this article draws on conceptions and insights from cultural risk theory to argue that human risk behaviour and decision-making is the play’s main focus and determines characterisation as well as structure. Interrogating the tension between aesthetic form and content, it shows how The Children naturalizes the (post-)apocalyptic condition and strives for a balance of scales with regard to collective and personal crisis. Characteristic of the rapidly growing corpus of contemporary “cli-fi” drama, and in accordance with many of the strategies proclaimed by climate communication theory, the play stages the catastrophic implications of environmental destruction predominantly as collective risk management and in a predominantly realist manner, discarding formal experimentation as well as futurist setting. Yet this article argues that it remains ambiguous what kind of risk management is proposed and whether we should read it as a call for action or as an imaginative means of accepting finitude.

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