A Review of “Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century”

2010 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 385-387
Author(s):  
C. Dale Walton
2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-50
Author(s):  
Claire Colebrook

There is something more catastrophic than the end of the world, especially when ‘world’ is understood as the horizon of meaning and expectation that has composed the West. If the Anthropocene is the geological period marking the point at which the earth as a living system has been altered by ‘anthropos,’ the Trumpocene marks the twenty-first-century recognition that the destruction of the planet has occurred by way of racial violence, slavery and annihilation. Rather than saving the world, recognizing the Trumpocene demands that we think about destroying the barbarism that has marked the earth.


2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Anna Gordon

One of the unique challenges of reading Les damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth) today is that while it is an irredeemably revolutionary text, we live in a counter-revolutionary moment or in a global context that has tried very hard to discredit even the possibility of revolution. Fanon’s text does not only narrate the effective undertaking of an anti-colonial struggle—of what is required for people to identify the actual causes of their alienation and unfreedom and together to will their elimination—it also outlines the various, often dialectical challenges of restructuring a society from the bottom up. Guiding and evident in the latter is the flourishing of what Fanon suggestively called national consciousness. Elaborating its meaning and ongoing usefulness is the focus of this essay.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 448-455
Author(s):  
Gerd Bayer

Abstract This essay discusses Bessie Head’s When Rain Clouds Gather from an ecocritical perspective, asking how her late 1960s’ novel already anticipated some of the politics of early twenty-first-century environmental thinking in the postcolonial sphere. The alliance of various marginalized characters who, one way or another, violate against existing hegemonic structures replaces the ideological and cultural conflict over territory, which derived directly from the colonialist past, with an agricultural revolution that aims to empower those who most closely resemble the subaltern classes variously theorized in postcolonial theory. This re-turn to the physical or even Real, to the materiality of the earth, opens up an alternative to the cultural essentialism that, from its beginning, created numerous stumbling stones on the path towards decolonization. Through its turn towards farming and the land and away from cultural forms of hegemony, the novel emphasizes the materiality of reality.


2004 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 495-503 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Robson

WHAT DO WE EXPECTto learn when we scrutinize the boundaries of, or within, Victorian literary studies at the beginning of the twenty-first century? Because many nineteenth-century scholars had always worked within an interdisciplinary paradigm, the theoretical shifts of the last thirty years or so, which broke down divisions between generically distinct discourses, could be said to have brought continuity, rather than change, to this particular community. Yet it is probably true that a pre-existing predilection for historicist investigation has gained added strength in Victorianist circles in recent times. Certain kinds of journeys have become especially common: intrepid explorers travel beyond the bounds of a literary text to hitherto unimagined contexts, and then return to said text laden with the spoils of their expeditions. The exotic voyage to discover the strangeness of the Victorians, then, has become a familiar event; we have witnessed an expansion of the empire of possible connections. Rarer than these heroic ventures, however, has been the practice of quiet contemplation: we have perhaps been less adept at standing still, and looking carefully at the ground we already hold, the ground we assume we share with our nineteenth-century predecessors. What happens when we eschew the temptation to strike out across new territory, and turn our eyes merely to the earth below? Might we discover boundaries between the Victorians and ourselves in the most mundane, the most fundamental of places?


Zygon® ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 904-909 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew T. Riley

Author(s):  
Bryan Moore

      It is common to assume that the ancient Greeks and Romans were essentially anthropocentric in point of view. While this is partly true (as it is today), the ancients established important precedents that challenge and overturn this view, anticipating modern science and even Darwin and beyond. This article analyzes texts from the Presocratics to late antiquity to show how the questioning of anthropocentrism developed over roughly 800 years. This matters because overcoming our present ecological crises demands that we reassess our place on the earth and draw down our impact on the planet. The ancients show that the questioning of anthropocentrism it nothing new; their work is part of the bridge required to help us move more responsibly into the later parts of the twenty-first century and beyond. Resumen        Es común asumir que los griegos y romanos antiguos tenían un punto de vista esencialmente antropocéntrico. Aunque esto es cierto en parte (como hoy en día), los antiguos establecieron precedentes importantes que desafían y dan la vuelta a esta perspectiva, anticipándose a la ciencia moderna e incluso a Darwin y más allá. Este artículo analiza textos desde los Presocráticos hasta la antigüedad tardía para mostrar cómo se cuestionó el antropocentrismo durante aproximadamente 800 años. Esto es importante porque para vencer las crisis ecológicas actuales es necesario que re-evaluemos nuestro lugar en la tierra y que reduzcamos nuestro impacto en el planeta. Los antiguos demuestran que cuestionarse el antropocentrismo no es nada nuevo; su trabajo es parte del puente necesario para ayudarnos a trasladarnos más responsablemente hacia el último periodo del siglo XXI y más allá.


2001 ◽  
Vol 2001 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-33
Author(s):  
James E. Elliott

ABSTRACT In the next 20 years, global shipping is expected to triple, with over 90% of all materials moving via ship (G. Miller, U.S. Representative from California, letter to the U.S. Coast Guard, June 8, 1998). With this unprecedented growth in maritime transportation, there will likely be unprecedented growth in the number of oil spills. This increase in global trade, and ultimately pollution, is founded in the belief that an ever-expanding economy is both possible and desirable. Today, the majority of policy makers and economists strive to stimulate economic growth and globalization regardless of the long-term implications to the environment. The economic theory used to derive these goals assumes environmental sources and sinks are infinite relative to the economy and the environment is a subset of the economy. From an ecological economics perspective, a policy goal of infinite growth will increase oil spills and ultimately be impossible. The earth is finite. The economy depends on the earth's low-entropy matter and energy, such as oil, natural gas and minerals, to exist. The economy is therefore dependent on the earth and is a subset of the environment. Since the earth's sources and sinks are finite, there are limits to the amount of growth possible. Evidence of these limits is the unprecedented loss in biodiversity and global climate change. The solution to preventing oil spills in the twenty-first century is a paradigm shift that accepts the economy as a subset of the environment and implements economic policies that strive for an optimal macroeconomic scale. According to Daly and Townsend (1993), “an optimal scale is one that is at least sustainable and does not sacrifice ecosystem services that are worth more at the margin than the production benefits derived from the growth in the scale of resource use.” Using the accepted economic theories of Smith and Ricardo, with the steady-state theory of Daly, this paper outlines the roots of the current economic paradigm and offers sustainable political-economic policies to prevent oil spills in the long term.


Author(s):  
S Kamata

Although the railways are said to be kind to the environment, they do consume energy and emit carbon dioxides. They must make it their own responsibility to work ceaselessly at further reducing these effects. The most important point in this respect is whether the railway companies have established a means in management for tackling the problem of improving the environment independently and continuously. In Japan, railways have been an important part of Japan's transport system. In 1994, JR East started up the Committee of Ecology and decided on three basic policies. Great strides have been made, for example, with the environment management system, energy-saving efforts, the movement to grow forests and the reduction in rubbish. It should become increasingly important to have firm strategies for this field in the future, especially in the twenty first century which is being called the ‘environment century’.


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