Cassandra Laity (University of Tennessee Knoxville), spoke on “Feminist Geophilia: Modernist Love Poetry’s 'Rock Roses' and Darwin’s Beagle Geology,” as part of an ongoing “geologic turn.” The question here is geophilia in Darwin and Bishop. Darwin’s travel narrative geologizes (e.g. the Andes mountains) (cf. Petrarch!). Bishop’s “Vague poem” then here responds to Darwin, recasting, re-gendering it—this is her own geo-Darwinian travel narrative, where an Oklahoma rock-scape (the rose rocks) “is” her beloved’s body (vagina) (again, landscape first, people second), combining bio- and geo- forces, opening up ways to think about how to start displacing the man-ness of the (M)Anthropocene. Source of "rock rose" image to left. Zach Horton [website here; recent film here] (Univ. of California, Santa Barbara) spoke on: “Nineteenth-Century Geoengineering: The Speculative Climatology of John Ruskin and Jules Verne.” Suggests that discourses of geo-engineering appeared in the 1980s (space mirrors, carbon-dioxide scrubbers, stratospheric aerosol injection, etc.), to cool the Earth down. Much of these projects funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. But Horton suggests that, even if the word wasn’t around, the idea of geoengineering is much older. Discussion of Ruskin (fascinated by weather—as the Cloud Appreciation Society notes, too!)—his vision of a climate-engineered British empire; then of Jules Vernes’ Sans dessus dessous (WP).
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Project THE HUMANIST anthropoceneis a thought archive and workspace of Phillip John Usher (NYU) at the crossroads of early modern humanism and the problems and insights of the Anthropocene. Main Research Page. Categories
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Related SitesASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment)
Environmental Humanities (journal) Resilience (A Journal of the Environmental Humanities) All text and images quoted from other sources used according to fair use. If I have used one of your images and you would like me to remove it, please email me.
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