Science Literacy Week September 20 - 26, 2021

Blends personal narrative, cultural criticism, and ecological thought to ponder human-driven catastrophe on a planetary scale. This book is not about defining or settling the Anthropocene, but rather about articulating what it's like to live in the Anthropocene, to live with a sense of its nagging presence--even as the stakes grow higher with each passing year, each oncoming storm.

The first book to examine the catastrophic role that climate change and infectious diseases played in the collapse of Rome's power--a story of nature's triumph over human ambition. Interweaving a grand historical narrative with cutting-edge climate science and genetic discoveries, Kyle Harper traces how the fate of Rome was decided not just by emperors, soldiers, and barbarians but also by volcanic eruptions, solar cycles, climate instability, and devastating viruses and bacteria.

The precocious economy, unusual environment, and dynamic intellectual culture of the Dutch Republic in its seventeenth-century Golden Age allowed it to thrive as neighbouring societies unraveled in the face of extremes in temperature and precipitation. The overall success of their Republic in coping with climate change offers lessons that we would be wise to heed today, as we confront the growing crisis of global warming.

A sea voyage to Norway'senvironmentally threatened Svalbard archipelago that traces the impacts of climate change on those northern lands.

Weaves together evidence from climatology, archaeology, and human history to tell a new story of America's colonial beginnings--one both novel and yet relevant and familiar for a world now facing an uncertain future of environmental and climatic change.

Using Henry David Thoreau's classic Walden; or, Life in the Woods as his source for environmental data from the mid-19th century, Primack details how climate change has affected Massachusetts's Walden Pond and its environs in just 160 years.

For centuries, humans have excelled at mimicking nature in order to exploit it. Now, with the existential threat of global climate change on the horizon, the ever-provocative Michael Taussig asks what function a newly invigorated mimetic faculty might exert along with such change. Mastery of Non-Mastery in the Age of Meltdown is not solely a reflection on our condition but also a theoretical effort to reckon with the impulses that have fed our relentless ambition for dominance over nature.

Addresses the climate's relationship with capitalism and the role of activism in highlighting the climate change emergency.

The first edition, published in 2009. pioneered the study of climate change through the lens of anthropology, covering the relation between human cultures and the environment from prehistoric times to the present. This 2nd revised edition brings the material on this rapidly changing field up to date, with major scholars from around the world mapping out trajectories of research and issuing specific calls for action.

The contributors offer various perspectives on how a just transition toward a fossil-free economy can take shape, as they share efforts to protect water resources, better feed their communities, and implement new approaches to urban policy and energy democracy.

Examines the ways fiction and poetry engage with environmental consciousness, and how African literary criticism addresses the implications of global environmental transformations.

Responds to the critical need for transdisciplinary research on the relationship between colonialism and catastrophe.

Introduces readers to the history and most significant flashpoints in climate justice through speculative fictions and social movements to explore post-disaster possibilities and the art of world-making

Argues that environmental crisis fiction is characterised by a thematic use of ‘death’, through which it explores a ‘crisis’ of both environment and self.

Tells the story of how American theater has shaped popular understandings of the environment throughout the twentieth century as it argues for theater's potential power in the age of climate change.

A highly topical, cross-disciplinary work will be of interest to anyone concerned about the growing climate emergency and makes a valuable contribution to climate law, environmental law, the environmental humanities and ecocriticism.

Drawing together key frameworks and disciplines that illuminate the importance of communication around climate change, this Research Handbook offers a vital knowledge base to address the urgency of conveying climate issues to a variety of audiences.

Roy Scranton combines memoir, reportage, philosophy, and Zen wisdom to explore what it means to be human in a rapidly evolving world, taking readers on a journey through street protests, the latest findings of earth scientists, a historic UN summit, millennia of geological history, and the persistent vitality of ancient literature. Expanding on his influentialNew York Times essay (the #1 most-emailed article the day it appeared, and selected forBest American Science and Nature Writing 2014), Scranton responds to the existential problem of global warming by arguing that in order to survive, we must come to terms with our mortality. Plato argued that to philosophize is to learn to die. If that's true, says Scranton, then we have entered humanity's most philosophical age--for this is precisely the problem of the Anthropocene. The trouble now is that we must learn to die not as individuals, but as a civilization.

Climate change governance is in a state of enormous flux. New and more dynamic forms of governing are appearing around the international climate regime centred on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). They appear to be emerging spontaneously from the bottom up, producing a more dispersed pattern of governing, which Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom famously described as 'polycentric'. This book brings together contributions from some of the world's foremost experts to provide the first systematic test of the ability of polycentric thinking to explain and enhance societal attempts to govern climate change.

In This Changes Everything Naomi Klein argues that climate change isn't just another issue to be neatly filed between taxes and health care. It's an alarm that calls us to fix an economic system that is already failing us in many ways. Klein meticulously builds the case for how massively reducing our greenhouse emissions is our best chance to simultaneously reduce gaping inequalities, re-imagine our broken democracies, and rebuild our gutted local economies. She exposes the ideological desperation of the climate-change deniers, the messianic delusions of the would-be geoengineers, and the tragic defeatism of too many mainstream green initiatives. And she demonstrates precisely why the market has not-and cannot-fix the climate crisis but will instead make things worse, with ever more extreme and ecologically damaging extraction methods, accompanied by rampant disaster capitalism.

When global climate change and economic crises lead to social chaos in the early 2020s, California becomes full of dangers, from pervasive water shortage to masses of vagabonds who will do anything to live to see another day. Fifteen-year-old Lauren Olamina lives inside a gated community with her preacher father, family, and neighbors, sheltered from the surrounding anarchy. In a society where any vulnerability is a risk, she suffers from hyperempathy, a debilitating sensitivity to others’ emotions.

A Children's Bible follows a group of twelve eerily mature children on a forced vacation with their families at a sprawling lakeside mansion. Contemptuous of their parents, the children decide to run away when a destructive storm descends on the summer estate, embarking on a dangerous foray into the apocalyptic chaos outside. Lydia Millet's prophetic and heartbreaking story of generational divide offers a haunting vision of what awaits us on the far side of Revelation.