The Chicago metropolitan area is home to far more protected nature than most people realize. Over half a million acres of protected land known as the Chicago Wilderness are owned and managed by ...county forest preserve districts and other public and private sector partners. But there's a critical factor of the Chicago Wilderness conservation effort that makes it unique: a pioneering grassroots volunteer community, thousands strong, has worked for decades alongside agency staff to restore these nearby natural areas, learning how to manage biodiversity in an altered and ever-changing urban context. A Healthy Nature Handbook captures hard-earned ecological wisdom from this community in engaging and highly readable chapters, each including illustrated restoration sequences. Restoration leaders cover large-scale seeding approaches, native seed production, wetland and grassland bird habitat restoration, monitoring, and community building. Contributions from local artists bring the region's beauty to life with vibrant watercolors, oil paintings, and sketches. A Healthy Nature Handbook is packed with successful approaches to restoring nature and is a testament to both the Chicago region's surprising natural wealth and the stewards that are committed to its lasting health.
Environmentalism, in theory and practice, is concerned with protecting nature. But if we have now reached "the end of nature," as Bill McKibben and other environmental thinkers have declared, what is ...there left to protect? InThinking like a Mall, Steven Vogel argues that environmental thinking would be better off if it dropped the concept of "nature" altogether and spoke instead of the "environment" -- that is, the world that actually surrounds us, which is always abuiltworld, the only one that we inhabit. We need to think not so much like a mountain (as Aldo Leopold urged) as like a mall. Shopping malls, too, are part of the environment and deserve as much serious consideration from environmental thinkers as do mountains. Vogel argues provocatively that environmental philosophy, in its ethics, should no longer draw a distinction between the natural and the artificial and, in its politics, should abandon the idea that something beyond human practices (such as "nature") can serve as a standard determining what those practices ought to be. The appeal to nature distinct from the built environment, he contends, may be not merely unhelpful to environmental thinking but in itself harmful to that thinking. The question for environmental philosophy is not "how can we save nature?" but rather "what environment should we inhabit, and what practices should we engage in to help build it?"
Internationally agreed sustainability goals are being missed. Here, we conduct global meta‐analyses to assess how the extent to which humans see themselves as part of nature—known as human–nature ...connectedness (HNC)—can be used as a leverage point to reach sustainability. A meta‐analysis of 147 correlational studies shows that individuals with high HNC had more pronature behaviours and were significantly healthier than those with low HNC. A meta‐analysis of 59 experimental studies shows significant increases in HNC after manipulations involving contact with nature and mindfulness practices. Surprisingly, this same meta‐analysis finds no significant effect of environmental education on HNC. Thus, HNC is positively linked to mind‐sets that value sustainability and behaviours that enhance it. Further, we argue that HNC can be enhanced by targeted practices, and we identify those most likely to succeed. Our results suggest that enhancing HNC, via promotion of targeted practices, can improve sustainability and should be integrated into conservation policy.
Crimes against Nature reveals the hidden history behind three of the nation's first parklands: the Adirondacks, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon. Focusing on conservation's impact on local ...inhabitants, Karl Jacoby traces the effect of criminalizing such traditional practices as hunting, fishing, foraging, and timber cutting in the newly created parks. Jacoby reassesses the nature of these "crimes" and provides a rich portrait of rural people and their relationship with the natural world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
In Milton and Ecology, Ken Hiltner engages with literary, theoretical, and historic approaches to explore the ideological underpinnings of our prevalent environmental crisis. Focusing on Milton's ...rejection of dualistic theology, metaphysical philosophy, and early-modern subjectivism, Hiltner argues that Milton anticipates certain prevailing essential ecological arguments. Even more remarkable is that Milton was able to integrate these arguments with biblical sources so seamlessly that his interpretative 'Green' reading of scripture has for over three centuries been entirely plausible. This study considers how Milton, from the earliest edition of the Poems, not only sought to tell the story of how through humanity's folly Paradise on earth was lost, but also sought to tell how it might be regained. This intriguing study will be of interest to eco-critics and Milton specialists alike.
Scientists turn to metaphors to formulate and explain scientific concepts, but an ill-considered metaphor can lead to social misunderstandings and counterproductive policies, Brendon Larson observes ...in this stimulating book. He explores how metaphors can entangle scientific facts with social values and warns that, particularly in the environmental realm, incautious metaphors can reinforce prevailing values that are inconsistent with desirable sustainability outcomes.
Metaphors for Environmental Sustainabilitydraws on four case studies-two from nineteenth-century evolutionary science, and two from contemporary biodiversity science-to reveal how metaphors may shape the possibility of sustainability. Arguing that scientists must assume greater responsibility for their metaphors, and that the rest of us must become more critically aware of them, the author urges more critical reflection on the social dimensions and implications of metaphors while offering practical suggestions for choosing among alternative scientific metaphors.
Since 2015, the project Sprachalltag II has been running at the Institute of Historical and Cultural Anthropology in Tübingen. In addition to the final processing of the Sprachatlas von Nord ...Baden-Württemberg (SNBW), begun in 2009, and the creation of a popular, online Sprechender Sprachatlas von Baden-Württemberg, the goal is to research and digitize the extensive material of the Arno-Ruoff archive for further linguistic and ethnologic studies.
This project in particular includes the transcription and alignment of the dialect recordings collected by Ruoff and Bausinger since 1955 for the so called Zwirner corpus as well as the publication of the edited texts in a database in cooperation with the IDS Mannheim. After researching mainly on the morphological and syntactic level of the corpus, the project now also enables phonological examinations of the spoken language throughout the federal state of Baden-Württemberg and the area of Bavarian Swabia via the database.
This report will introduce the nature and extent of the hitherto edited recordings in more detail and show how, in the sense of a cross-disciplinary collaboration, Empirical Cultural Studies can benefit from the content development of the Tübingen corpus. In the course of editing, the transcripted dialect recordings are assigned to thematic categories by using keywords such as leisure or modernization. This includes the means of enquiry of the corpus to a content-related level that can serve the research fields of Historical and Cultural Anthropology.
•We examine how nature dose varies with urbanisation and its impacts on health.•There was a negative exponential relationship between dose and urbanisation.•Frequency and duration of dose were ...positively associated with four health domains.•Some health benefits from dimensions of dose were greater in urban areas.•Health interventions should foster nature orientation to promote greenspace use.
The last 100 years have seen a huge change in the global structure of the human population, with the majority of people now living in urban rather than rural environments. An assumed consequence is that people will have fewer experiences of nature, and this could have important consequences given the myriad health benefits that they can gain from such experiences. Alternatively, as experiences of nature become rarer, people might be more likely actively to seek them out, mitigating the negative effects of urbanisation. In this study, we used data for 3000 survey respondents from across the UK, and a nature-dose framework, to determine whether (a) increasing urbanisation is associated with a decrease in the frequency, duration and intensity of nature dose; and (b) differences in nature exposure associated with urbanisation impact on four population health outcomes (depression, self-reported health, social cohesion and physical activity). We found negative exponential relationships between nature dose and the degree of urbanisation. The frequency and duration of dose decreased from rural to suburban environments, followed by little change with further increases in urbanisation. There were weak but positive associations between frequency and duration of dose across all four health domains, while different dimensions of dose showed more positive associations with specific health domains in towns and cities. We show that people in urban areas with a low nature dose tend to have worse health across multiple domains, but have the potential for the greatest gains from spending longer in nature, or living in green areas.
The green mantle of the earth! This metaphor conceives of the vegetation of the earth as a green cloth that drapes the barren earth. Long popular in patristic literature Il mantello verde della terra ...is a poetical image that ponders the providential greening of the earth on the third day of the Creation. Borrowing from the vocabulary of weaving it epitomizes the Renaissance interest in "fashioning green worlds" in art and poetry. Rachel Carson invoked the phrase to draw attention to environmental damage done to earth's "brilliant robe." Here it serves as a motto for a cultural poetics that made "living nature" an object of renewed interest. The essays gathered in this volume explore the expanding technologies and cultural dimensions of verzure and verdancy in the Italian Renaissance, and the role of painting in shaping the poetics and expression of greenery in the visual arts of the 16th-century and after.
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