Environmentalism and Sustainability as an Expression of Islamic Morality

The present essay relates to a line of enquiry that focuses on the Islamic contribution to the values held in common by different cultural traditions, with the aim of working towards a shared ethical conscience and peaceful coexistence in the cities of a globalised world. The essay emphasises cultural specificities, starting with the terminology currently used to describe environmentalism and sustainability. Drawing on the works of a number of contemporary Arab Muslim intellectuals, my enquiry aims to look at environmental sustainability from an Islamic perspective, and to address it as part of the ethical heritage of Islam.

Cunning as... a Wolf Multispecies Relations Between Humans and Wolves in Eastern Siberia

Recent anthropological reasoning fostered by the ontological turn debate, has tackled the issue of multispecies ethnography: it deals with the lives and deaths of all the creatures that for decades have stayed on the margins of anthropology. According to this approach, animals, insects, plants and other organisms have started to appear alongside humans with legibly biographical and political lives. Focused on the changing contours of the ‘nature’ wriggling within whatever ‘human nature’ might mean, multispecies ethnography recalls that “human nature is an interspecies relationship”, as Anna Tsing would put it (Tsing 1995, 94). This last statement may also refer to the connections between humans and animals. In my paper I will take into account relations and connections between wolves and humans among hunters in Sakha-Yakutia, Eastern Siberia.

Trees, Birds and Other Non-Humans Mythological Entanglements with Landscape, Flora, Fauna and Spirits of the Himalayas

his paper takes into account ideas about landscape and environment as they emerge from the study of beliefs, mythology and ritual activities of religious specialists of the Himalayan region, showing a deep and enduring web of relational entanglements between human and other-than-human communities. The notion of persoonhood seems, in fact, to transcend the human dimension in order to include a wider and larger set of other-than-human communities, including mountains, waters, plants, animals and other classes of beings.

From the Birth of the Soundscape Concept to the Sound Ambient in Disneyland-Paris

Giovanni De Zorzi traces the historical and aesthetical background of ‘soundscape’, from the sound/noise opposition in physics to the reconsideration of ‘noise’ by the avant-gardes of the twentieth century arriving to the conceptions of Murray Schafer and Steven Feld, which gave birth to many nowadays disciplines. After this, Alessio Calandra deals with the possible influence of the soundscape of Disneyland Park, an amusement park in Disneyland Paris: he begins from some ‘physical’ places of the Park, such as Main Street U.S.A., Frontierland, Adventureland, and arrives to the detailed analysis of their specific soundscape related to the sale of Disney-branded gadgets and products within the park.

General Introduction to Environmental Humanities in India The Ecocritical Discourse in Hindu Literature

The article offers a general overview of the ecological debate and Environmental Humanities in India. After an introduction on the legacy of Gandhian ecological thought and contemporary literature, the essay focuses on the most discussed themes of the Indian classical tradition, with particular references to sacred texts (Vedas, Puranas, the epics). The sum of this knowledge is placed on the recursive perspective of Indian time: as yugas change, new structures of social life arise, reformulating society and its environment in a more holistic and sustainable way. This would be possible without ever denying the responsibility we all have in maintaining that personal empathy towards the environment that is reflected in Indian classical texts.

Venetian Lagoon Mussel Farming Between Tradition and Innovation An Example of Changes in Perception and Multispecies Relations

In Venetian lagoon, mussels as a food, together with technical innovations and new knowledge for their exploitation, are a recent discovery. In the past, the lagoon’s fishers considered them inedible. The first mussel farming was launched in 1939 and mussels began a new process of rehabilitation. It is the beginning of a new relationship. Mussels turn themselves into delicate animals that need care and fishers develop new interactions with the other non-human components of the environment. A mutual relationship (or inter-agentivity) is created between mussel farmers and mussels, and it brings undeniable advantages to both species.

Indigenous Shamanic Worldviews as Dialogical Eco-Cosmology

This article deals with indigenous shamanic worldviews and indigenous knowledge as dialogical eco-cosmology. It shows the relevance of eco-cosmology as local indigenous ecological and spiritual knowledge in the context of global biodiversity and sustainability discourses.

Imagining Venetian Hydro-Peripatetics with Ciardi, Favretto, Lansyer, and Pasini

This article proposes a sensory approach to physical and representational environments based on a pedestrian perspective. With a view to bringing arts-based considerations to bear on UN Sustainable Development Goal 6.6, concerned with the protection and restoration of water-related ecosystems, the analysis primarily revolves around Italian and French depictions of Venice in the 1880s-1890s that encompass stimuli for smell, sound, taste, and touch as much as sight. Close readings are undertaken to highlight hyperlocal elements that merit consideration when determining courses of action for the long-term good of the lagoonscape.

The Meteorological Occult: Submergences in the Venetian Fog

Blinking away fog as it collects between eyelashes – this article begins with a night walk in Venice and a reflection on an embodied encounter with countless suspended water particles. Here I consider fog as a political materiality in an expanded cultural and meteorological context, where, rather than simply limiting visibility, fog acts as an unexpected lens onto slow forms of pollution. In doing so, I turn to the scientific term ‘occult deposition’ – the settling of unsensed pollutants carried by fogs, mists, clouds, dew, and frosts onto surfaces, vegetation, and skin – and adapt it to develop the concept of ‘occult meteorology’. By doing so, I work towards reorienting the cultural significance of the occult. With this reorientation, instead of limiting human sensing, or harbouring unknown and threatening supernatural presences, fog is the intensity of sensing, relationally mediating through eyes, mouths and skins. Here bodies are submerged in everyday and imperceptibly polluted environments even above the surface of water, while fog disorients vast infrastructural systems, from commercial flight to petrochemical logistics. Thinking alongside Esther Leslie and Craig Martin, this article brings earth sciences into encounter with literature and cinema to attend to fog as both metaphor and materiality in the context of environmental degradation.