Reviews

Milena Benovska (2021), Orthodox Revivalism in Russia: Driving Forces and Moral Quests (London: Routledge), ix + 193 pp., hbk. £120, ISBN 978036747420-1.Tobias Köllner (2021), Religion and Politics in Contemporary Russia: Beyond the Binary of Power and Authority (London: Routledge), 165 pp., ISBN: 978-1-138-35468-5Giuseppe Tateo (2020), Under the Sign of the Cross: The People’s Salvation Cathedral and the Church Building Industry in Postsocialist Romania, (Oxford-New York: Berghahn), 243pp., ISBN:978-1-78920-858-0, $120.00/£89.00Tornike Metreveli (2020), Orthodox Christianity and the Politics of Transition: Ukraine, Serbia and Georgia (London: Routledge), 196 pp., $120.00, ISBN 9780367420079.Valdimar Tr. Hafstein and Martin Skrydstrup (2020), Patrimonialities: Heritage vs. Property (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 102 pp., $20.00, ISBN 9781108928380.Modeen, Mary and Iain Biggs (2021), Creative Engagements with Ecologies of Place: Geopoetics, Deep Mapping and Slow Residencies (London: Routledge). 258pp; 71 colour illustrations; ISBN Hb 9780367545758, £120.00; ISBN ebook 9781003089773, £25.89Samantha Walton (2020), The Living World: Nan Shepherd and Environmental Thought (London: Bloomsbury Academic) ISBN 1350153389 and 978-1-3501-5322-6, 210 pp. £90.00Jone Salomonsen, Michael Houseman, Sarah M. Pike and Graham Hervey (eds.) (2021), Reassembling Democracy: Ritual as a Cultural Resource (London: Bloomsbury Academic), 249pp., Open Access, DOI 10.5040/9781350123045, Paperback: £28.99

Seeking Nietzsche’s Great Tree of Humanity: The Overhuman and Powers’s The Overstory

This essay reconstructs Nietzsche’s ecological and environmental thought by focusing on his idea of the human-earth (Menschen-Erde) and his deep concern for the natural world. It then articulates these thoughts in a coordinate reading of Richard Powers’s environmentally focused novel The Overstory (2019). Nietzsche understands that the human position on the Earth is precarious and that we are in danger of injuring our fragile environmental surround. I attempt to clarify the contemporary relevance of this thought by showing how his diagnosis chimes with current ecological thinking. Nietzsche saw not only dangers but opportunities in the relation of humans to their environment. His writings as well as his daily life exhibit intense interest in trees and forests. He foresaw that too much forest clearing could endanger the climate, leading to excessive warming. Nietzsche also imagined that the humans might foster a “great tree of humanity” (WS 188-89), a green expansion of their environment, and Zarathustra anticipates living in the world as a garden (Z “The Convalescent”). Richard Powers’s The Overstory speaks to a time that is much more deeply informed about our precarious ecological situation. The novelist dramatizes this in a narrative that brings together a number of disparate individuals, drawn to defend an old-growth US West Coast forest from the state-supported depradations of industrial logging. These figures learn about “the secret life of trees,” their mutual dependence and communication, as they experiment with a new life high among the branches. Their different fates pose a variety of questions relevant to Nietzsche’s ideas for a transvalued Earth.

Karoline von Günderrode (1780–1806)

This chapter presents three unpublished works by Karoline von Günderrode. In them, Günderrode discusses and assesses the moral philosophy of Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Schelling’s philosophy of nature, while also developing her own ethical account of the human relation to the earth in the essay “Idea of the Earth.” Widely regarded as her most important and radical contribution, “Idea of the Earth” distinguishes Günderrode among her contemporaries and places her in proximity to current environmental thought.

Stones at War: The Chelyabinsk War Exhibition of 1946 and Soviet Environmental Thought

One year after the German surrender in World War II, an exhibition about the “Great Patriotic War” opened its doors in the regional museum of Chelyabinsk. The curators presented the visitors with a geological take on the war events: the exhibition employed a geological time frame, which started with the genesis of planet Earth, and displayed a large introductory section on natural resources of the Southern Urals, the museum’s home region. The exhibition makers reasoned that the Soviet war effort was inextricably linked to the region’s inanimate environment with its rich deposits of minerals and metals. Based on archival documents and published sources, this article explores how a narrative focusing on minerals and metals could find a place in an exhibition about the Soviet war effort. It argues that the museum director’s personal background as an earth scientist, the short-lived regional diversity of war memory in the postwar Soviet Union, and a particular vein of environmental thought that was widespread in Soviet and international geology influenced this remarkable exhibition.

A methodology for evaluating university environmental thought

The socioeconomic and environmental attributes that characterize the environmental thought are the elements used to design a methodology to evaluate the substantive functions of teaching and research in the university environment, in a public higher education institution in Mexico. The proposed methodology is based on tools and instruments to generate knowledge of big data information, making use of: Information and Communication Technologies; of the principles of multivariate data management that consider the distinctive uncertainty of environmental phenomena; and the generation of multidisciplinary databases to apply data mining and obtain information with a systemic approach. The proposed tool with its mixed approach applies to the operation and multimedia text database study and from there the KDD process knowledge is acquired. The application context of the proposed methodology is the information in text form, published electronically, in the educational offer of the 2017 undergraduate and postgraduate admissions at the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (BUAP).