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The Space Age is over? Not at all! A new planet has appeared: Earth. In the age of the Anthropocene, the Earth is a post-natural planet that can be remade at will, controlled and managed thanks to the prowess of geoengineering. This new imaginary is also accompanied by a new kind of power—geopower—which takes the entire Earth—in its social, biological and geophysical dimensions—as an object of knowledge, intervention, and governmentality. Far from merely being the fruit of the spirit of geo-capitalism, this new grand narrative has been championed by the theorists of the constructivist turn (be them ecomodernist, postenvironmentalist, or accelerationist to name a few) who have also called into question the great divide between nature and culture; but in the aftermath of the collapse of this divide, a cyborg, hybrid, flexible nature was built, an impoverished nature that does not exist without being performed by the technologies, human needs, and capitalist imperatives. Underneath this performative vision resides a hidden “a-naturalism” denying all otherness to nature and the Earth, no longer by externalizing it as a thing to be dominated, but by radically internalizing it as something to be digested. Constructivist ecology can hardly present itself in opposition to the geo-constructivist project, which also claims that there is no nature and that nothing will prevent human beings from replacing Earth with an Earth 2.0.

Coral Whisperers captures a key moment in the history of coral reef science and of environmental conservation at large. Drawing on more than one hundred interviews,the book documents the physical, intellectual, and emotional plight of coral scientists and their painstaking deliberations as they struggle to understand and save corals from what many of these scientistshave come to see as the corals’inevitable catastrophic future on a rapidly warming and otherwise assaulted planet.We are here in the thick of contemporary coral science, and we can feel its urgency: the experts, who are witnessing massive coral death around the planet, both grieve for this death and must simultaneously narrate it. Yet despite the desperate realities confronting corals in the Anthropocene, coral scientists have not given up hope. Through their engaging narratives, corals emerge as a sign, a measure, and a way out of the imminent catastrophe facinglife on earth.

Our species has transitioned from being one among millions on Earth to the species that is single-handedly transforming the entire planet to suit its own needs. In order to meet the daunting challenges of environmental sustainability in this epoch of human domination—known as the Anthropocene—ecologists have begun to think differently about the interdependencies between humans and the natural world. This book provides the best available introduction to what this new ecology is all about—and why it matters more than ever before. It describes how the science of ecology is evolving to provide a better understanding of how human agency is shaping the natural world, often in never-before-seen ways. The book emphasizes the importance of conserving species diversity, because it can offer a portfolio of options to keep our ecosystems resilient in the face of environmental change. It envisions humans taking on new roles as thoughtful stewards of the environment to ensure that ecosystems have the enduring capacity to supply the environmental services on which our economic well-being—and our very existence—depend. It offers the ecological know-how to maintain and enhance our planet's environmental performance and ecosystem production for the benefit of current and future generations. The book shows how today's ecology can provide the insights we need to appreciate the crucial role we play in this era of unprecedented global environmental transition.

Governing for sustainability in a world of complex systems will require new social capital in the form of innovative steering mechanisms that differ in important respects from those familiar to us from past experience. Complex systems feature high levels of connectivity, nonlinear dynamics, directional change, and emergent properties. Creating effective governance arrangements in such settings calls for an ability to combine the durability required to guide behavior with the agility needed to adjust or reform institutional arrangements to cope with rapidly changing circumstances. Success in such endeavors will depend on a capacity to supplement mainstream regulatory approaches to governance with new governance strategies. Promising examples include governance through goal-setting and principled governance. But additional innovations in this realm will be necessary to address needs for governance arising in the Anthropocene. The way forward in this effort will be to build cooperative relations between analysts and practitioners rather than treating them as separate communities that respond to different incentives and operate in different worlds.

Planetary-scale computation presents a fundamental challenge to Modern geopolitical architectures. As calculative reason and as global infrastructure, it not only deforms and distorts Westphalian political geography it creates new territories in its own image, ones that don’t necessarily replace the old but which are superimposed on them, each grinding against the other. These thickened and noisy jurisdictions are our new normal. They are the scaffolds through which our cultures evolve through them, and they represent our most difficult and important design challenge. Computation is changing not only how governments govern, but what government even is in the first place: less governance of computation than computation as governance. Global cloud platforms take on roles that have traditionally been the domain of States, cities become hardware/software platforms organized by physical and virtual interfaces, and strange new political subjects (some not even human) gain unforeseen sovereignties as the users of those interfaces. To understand (and to design) these transformations, we need to see them as part of a whole, an accidental megastructure called The Stack. This book examines each layer of The Stack–Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, and User—as a dynamic technology that is re-structuring some part of our world at its particular scale and as part of the whole. The Stack is a platform, and so combines logics of both States and Markets, and produces forms of sovereignty that are unique to this technical and institutional form. Fortunately, stack platforms are made to be re-made. How the Stack-we-have becomes the Stack-to-come depends on how well we understand it as a totality, By seeing the whole we stand a better chance of designing a system we will want to inhabit. To formulate the “design brief” for that project, as this book does, requires a perspective that blends philosophical, geopolitical and technological understandings and methods.

Today's global media sustains a potent new environmental consciousness. Paradoxically, it also serves as a far-reaching platform that promotes the unsustainable consumption ravaging our planet. Patrick Murphy musters theory, institutional analysis, fieldwork, and empirical research to map how the media communicates today's many distinct, competing, and even antagonistic environmental discourses, demonstrating how the media pushes us to save the whales even as we are encouraged to devour all the fish. By examining this paradox through case studies of the “greening” of cable TV, online corporate branding campaigns, indigenous media, and the globalization of commercial media, he shows how today's complex, integrated media networks draws the cultural boundaries of our environmental imagination—and influences just who benefits. Analysis emphasizes social context, institutional alignments, and commercial media's ways of rendering discussion. Murphy identifies and examines key terms, phrases, and metaphors as well as the ways consumers are presented with ideas like agency and the place of nature. What emerges is the link between pervasive messaging and an "environment" conjured by our media-saturated social imagination. As the author shows, today's complex, integrated media networks shape, frame, and deliver many of our underlying ideas about the environment. Increasingly—and ominously—individuals and communities experience these ideas not only in the developed world but in the increasingly consumption-oriented Global South.

Humanity’s collective impact on the Earth is vast. The rate and scale of human-driven environmental destruction is quickly outstripping our political and social capacities for managing it. We are in effect creating an Earth 2.0 on which the human signature is everywhere, a “new earth” in desperate need of humane and insightful guidance. In this volume, prominent scholars and practitioners in the field of global environmental politics consider the ecological and political realities of life on the new earth, and probe the field’s deepest and most enduring questions at a time of increasing environmental stress. Arranged in complementary pairs, the essays in this volume include reflections on environmental pedagogy, analysis of new geopolitical realities, reflections on the power of social movements and international institutions, and calls for more compelling narratives to promote environmental action. At the heart of the volume is sustained attention to the role of traditional scholarly activities in a world confronting environmental disaster. Some contributors make the case that it is the scholar’s role to provide activists with the necessary knowledge and tools; others argue for more direct engagement and political action. All the contributors confront the overriding question: What is the best use of their individual and combined energies, given the dire environmental reality?

A human-centred approach to the environment is leading to ecological collapse. One of the ways that speculative realism challenges anthropomorphism is by taking non-human things to be as valid objects of investivation as humans, allowing a more responsible and truthful view of the world to take place. Brian Willems uses a range of science fiction literature that questions anthropomorphism both to develop and challenge this philosophical position. He looks at how nonsense and sense exist together in science fiction, the way in which language is not a guarantee of personhood, the role of vision in relation to identity formation, the difference between metamorphosis and modulation, representations of non-human deaths and the function of plasticity within the Anthropocene. Willems considers the works of Cormac McCarthy, Paolo Bacigalupi, Neil Gaiman, China Miéville, Doris Lessing and Kim Stanley Robinson are considered alongside some of the main figures of speculative materialism including Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux and Jane Bennett.

Based on a multimethod study that centers on interviews with over 30 conservationists, field biologists, ecologists, paleontologists and over 3 years of my fieldwork on urban beaches in the New York City area, the Florida Keys, and international conferences, Catch and Release explores the interspecies relationships between humans and horseshoe crabs—our multiple sites of entanglement and enmeshment as we both come to matter. As I show, crabs and humans make each other in particular ways. Humans have literally harvested the life out of horseshoe crabs for multiple purposes; we interpret them for understanding geologic time, we bleed them for biomedical applications, we collect them for agricultural fertilizer, we eat them as delicacies, we rescue them for conservation, we capture them as bait, we categorize them as Endangered. In contrast, the crabs make humans matter by revealing our species vulnerability to endotoxins, offering opportunities for career opportunities and profiteering off of crab bodies, and fertilizing the soil of agricultural harvest for human food. In these acts of harvesting, I consider how horseshoe crabs and humans make meaning of events such as the Anthropocene (the epoch of geologic time that attributes climate change and species decline to human activities), global warming, and biomedical innovation.

Essentials of Landscape Ecology is a new, comprehensive text that presents the principles, theory, methods, and applications of landscape ecology in an engaging and accessible format, supplemented by numerous examples and case studies from a variety of systems, including freshwater and marine “scapes.” Human activity has transformed landscapes worldwide on a scale that rivals or exceeds even the largest of natural forces, giving rise to a new geological age, the Anthropocene. As humans alter the structure and function of landscapes, the biological diversity and ecological relationships within those landscapes are also inevitably altered, to the extent that this may interfere with humanity’s efforts to sustain the productivity and multifunctional use of these landscapes. Landscape ecology has thus emerged as a new, multidisciplinary science to investigate the effects of human land use and environmental heterogeneity on ecological processes across a wide range of scales and systems: from the effects of habitat or resource distributions on the individual movements, gene flow, and population dynamics of plants and animals; to the human alteration of landscapes affecting the structure of biological communities and the functioning of entire ecosystems; to the sustainable management of natural resources and the ecosystem goods and services upon which society depends.

Human-animal studies and the age of the anthropocene are prevalent across many disciplines at this time and this book is among the first to explore the usefulness of Deleuze for extensions and debates in these fields which only Deleuzian understandings of human subjectivity can provide. While Deleuzian studies has always been critical of the structure and status of human subjectivity, utilizing Deleuze in discussions of the contentious and unstable concept of the animal underlines the utility of his work for altering both theories and practices from art to philosophy to everyday activism. This book collects essays by established scholars in the field of Deleuze studies, and new scholars, to show not only the diversity of Deleuze’s applicability to human-animal studies but to call into question what we mean by the seemingly simple idea of ‘the animal’. Through 16 chapters Deleuze’s entire oeuvre is used in analysing television, film, music, art, drunkenness, mourning, virtual technology, protest, activism, animal rights and abolition. Each chapter questions the premise of the animal as a discrete, easily understood concept and thereby simultaneously places the human as animal and critiques the centrality of the human. The book aims to create new questions in reference to what the age of the anthropocene means by ‘animal’ as much as to analyse and explore examples of the unclear boundaries between human and animal.

This book enquires into the problem of various oppositions between pure entities such as nature and society, body and mind, science and the arts, subjectivity and objectivity. It examines how works of literature and cinema have contaminated constructions of the pure and the immune with their purported opposite. As an advanced critical introduction to the figure of contamination, the book makes explicit what so far has remained unarticulated—what has only been implied—within postmodern, poststructuralist and deconstructive theory. Combining theory with literary criticism, the book sheds light on how overlooked aspects of 'the novels of Henry James, Herman Melville and H. G. Wells question notions of natural order as well as an opposition between the subjective and the objective. It offers fresh readings of classic films and literary texts, including Vertigo and Moby Dick, with the aim to ground theoretical insights in close analysis. Key Features Critically engages with some aspects of contemporary theory that keep propounding a Cartesian notion of the mind’s control over the body Analyses how key thinkers such as Spinoza, Benjamin, Pasolini and Freud attempt to re-evaluate what Agamben calls ‘bare life’ Offers original readings of Pasolini’s notion of scandalo in terms of contamination Alerts us to the ways in which some aspects of contemporary posthumanism may merely reproduce the dialects of inclusion and exclusion which is still premised on traditional notions of purity and immunity

Current rates of species extinction exceed the evolutionary background rate, and some biologists claim we are witnessing the sixth mass extinction in the history of life on Earth. This book analyzes the narratives that shape public and expert debates about the extinction crisis to argue that biodiversity is primarily a cultural and political issue. Endangered and extinct species typically meet with interest when they are connected to stories about what a particular community believes to have lost through modernization and colonization. The first three chapters trace such engagements with modernization through texts and artworks (novels, poems, popular scientific books, paintings, films, and musical compositions) as well as through global biodiversity databases and biodiversity protection laws. Stories about endangered species often rely on the genre templates of elegy or tragedy; databases and photographic inventories also mobilize the strategies of epic and encyclopedia to convey the scope of the crisis. The last three chapters discuss the cultural meanings of biodiversity conservation in its conflicts and convergences with the animal welfare movement, the environmental justice movement, and debates about the Anthropocene. Drawing on multispecies ethnography, theories of cosmopolitanism, and Actor-Network-Theory, the book proposes multispecies justice as a new narrative for environmentalism that joins justice for disenfranchised human communities and justice for nonhuman species. By extending ecological cosmopolitanism across species boundaries, this form of justice foregrounds that definitions of what is human and what is just are culturally contingent and need to be negotiated in multispecies communities that are being modeled in speculative fiction.

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is one of the most recognizable acronyms among international organizations. It is mainly associated with the “oil shock” of 1973 when the price of petroleum increased fourfold and industrialized countries and consumers were forced to face the limits of their development model. This is the first history of OPEC and of its members written by a professional historian. It carries the reader from the formation of the first petrostate in the world, Venezuela in the late 1920s, to the global ascent of petrostates and OPEC in the 1970s, to their crisis at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s. Born in 1960, OPEC was the first international organization of the Global South. It was widely perceived as acting as the economic “spearhead” of the Global South and acquired a role that went far beyond the realm of oil politics. Petrostates such as Venezuela, Nigeria, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, have been (and still are) key regional actors and their enduring cooperation, defying wide political and cultural differences and even wars, speaks to the centrality of natural resources in the history of the twentieth century, and to the underlying conflict between producers and consumers of these natural resources. Being the first study to use previously unavailable OPEC sources, it offers surprising insights into the way of thinking of the ruling elites in petrostates and to the way the world looks when seen through their eyes.

Today, predicting the impact of human activities on the earth’s climate hinges on tracking interactions among phenomena of radically different dimensions, from the molecular to the planetary. Climate in Motion shows that this multiscalar, multicausal framework emerged well before computers and satellites. Extending the history of modern climate science back into the nineteenth century, Deborah R. Coen uncovers its roots in the politics of empire-building in central and eastern Europe. She argues that essential elements of the modern understanding of climate arose as a means of thinking across scales in a state—the multinational Habsburg Monarchy, a patchwork of medieval kingdoms and modern laws—where such thinking was a political imperative. Led by Julius Hann in Vienna, Habsburg scientists were the first to investigate precisely how local winds and storms might be related to the general circulation of the earth’s atmosphere as a whole. Linking Habsburg climatology to the political and artistic experiments of late imperial Austria, Coen grounds the seemingly esoteric science of the atmosphere in the everyday experiences of an earlier era of globalization. Climate in Motion presents the history of modern climate science as a history of “scaling”—that is, the embodied work of moving between different frameworks for measuring the world. In this way, it offers a critical historical perspective on the concepts of scale that structure thinking about the climate crisis today and the range of possibilities for responding to it.