The introduction takes the reader into the history of oil in the Ecuadorean Amazon in the twentieth century. Zooming out from the testimony of a former oil worker, a historical overview sheds light on the dynamics of oil extraction in the region by national and international companies. This history is analyzed from the interdisciplinary perspective of the Environmental Humanities, combining archival and oral sources, sociological and anthropological concepts, and a mixed-methods approach. From this vantage point, the changes in the rainforest brought by the oil industry can be narrated as a fundamental metamorphosis of the landscape, its ecology, and its inhabitants. Drawing from Amazonian and European notions of metamorphosis, four dimensions of this process are particularly relevant for the historical analysis: conceptual, material, toxic, and social. The metamorphosis as metaphor offers a perspective on historical change in the Amazon as a process driven by the conflictive interaction between the rainforest ecosystem and the narrative and material manifestations of the oil industry.

In the early 1990s, when Texaco left its operation in Ecuador behind, the metamorphosis of the Ecuadorean Amazon into a polluted resource environment came to light, attracting the interest of national and international NGOs and causing global and tedious legal aftermath: In the famous case Aguinda v. Texaco, a group of affected indigenous people and settlers sued the oil corporation to compensate for the environmental and social damage done in the Amazon – with mixed results. The final section of the book is structured in a loosely juridical fashion: starting with the discussion of the evidence – a summary of the recent history of the region and how human–nature relationships changed in the twentieth century – the conclusion problematizes the unfolding of the global legal battle and the contradicting judgments it produced. As the legal pathway appears to not offer justice to the affected people, a closing statement calls for alternative solutions to the plight of the Amazon, locally and globally.

This chapter explores a range of narrative fiction in Arabic in addition to two novels that hybridize Anglophone Arab literature with Arabic poetic influences. Theoretically anchored in critiques of bio/necropolitics, forced displacement, magical realist environmentalisms, and planetarity, the chapter examines eco-ambiguous visions of desertness in Ibrahim Al-Koni’s Gold Dust, forest/border thresholds in Hassan Blasim’s “Ali’s Bag,” bio-connective ambivalence in Rawi Hage’s Cockroach and Beirut Hellfire Society, and (eco)lienation in Ibtisam Azem’s The Book of Disappearance. Stretching from the North African desert to the European forest, from the North American city to contested spaces in the Middle East, the (dis)located works by the diasporic writers addressed here trace the contours of a planetary geoaesthetics that is concerned with borders and their transgression, resistance to immunitary bio/necropower, and reconstructions of comemorative geographies. An Arabic diasporic literary geography hence emerges as an ever-expanding space of encounter for unbounded modes of being, witnessing, telling, and resisting.

This chapter outlines “refugee ecology” as a concept through which to engage how refugees are depicted in relation to the environment. Focusing on portrayals of water, it compares recent media portrayals of refugees with refugee narratives to understand how maritime entities shape understandings of refugees. While more mainstream accounts often depict waterways as sites of danger from which refugees must be rescued, refugee narratives offer a wider array of aqueous representations. Examining Nam Le’s short story “The Boat” suggests that, for Vietnam War refugees, rivers, seas, and oceans are not simply merciless forces that threaten refugee life. Rather, they are also repositories of the dead, archives of memory, and spiritual forces that reflect intimate human–nonhuman ties and reveal Vietnam’s deep seafaring past. Interpreted through the lens of refugee ecology, “The Boat” reveals how mariner history and knowledge are critical to the survival and emergence of diasporas.

Modernist American writers and artists had multiple and often conflictual responses toward the many environmental issues that became a growing concern as a result of rapid modernization at the outset of the twentieth century. Few artists in the modernist period avowedly declared themselves to be environmentalists or subscribed to what came later to be defined as being “green.” This chapter examines methods used especially in recent years by scholars in studying the range of environmental matters of form and content in modernism. Close readings are provided of important texts by Zora Neale Hurston and John Steinbeck as examples of how to apply these ecocritical research methods.

Even when valorized for a political imagination that drew attention to the marginalized spaces and communities of a rapidly changing postbellum United States, regionalism (or “local color”) literature was long considered to be merely minor: written from and about sites marginal to the centers of culture and power, primarily by women, and appearing most prominently in the modest form of the short story or sketch. This essay reframes the regionalist short story through a renewed attention to its environmental representation, especially by attending to the genre’s questions of scale: the relation between region, nation, and globe; modernity and its relationship to a preindustrial past; the limitations and constraints of a minor form. Through discussions of Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Murfree, Bret Harte, and others, this essay argues that the regionalist short story’s environmental imagination decenters the human, while also revealing the co-constitution of a region and its literary archive.

There is a problem fermenting in the frigid waters of the Beaufort Sea, a portion of the Arctic Ocean north of Canada and the United States. The trouble has its roots in an 1825 treaty signed between Great Britain and Russia, which divided their North American territories into what are now Alaska and Yukon. In that treaty, the two empires drew a north–south boundary along the ‘Meridian Line of the 141st degree’ that ‘in its prolongation as far as the Frozen Ocean, shall form the limit between the Russian and British Possessions’.1 Nearly 200 years later the inheritors of this agreement, the United States and Canada, are interpreting the phrase ‘as far as the Frozen Ocean’ in contrasting ways. Canada understands this sentence to mean that the boundary between the two nations extends past the shoreline and into the Beaufort Sea, while the United States argues that the border ends at the coastline where the ‘Frozen Ocean’ begins.

This chapter has two purposes. First, to offer a vision of environmental humanities as an interdisciplinary endeavour that involves the core disciplines of the humanities, as well as their connections with other disciplines and ways of working within the academy and beyond. Second, to draw some conclusions from that vision for the kinds of issues of politics, dialogue and ethics that arise from the real-world problems on which environmental humanities bear. In other words, the chapter attempts to operationalise some of the key messages that the environmental humanities might have to propose in the real-world situation of today. This is a matter first of characterising that situation. Environmental humanities can help us make sense of the challenges that arise, albeit not in isolation. The point of the exercise is to seek appropriate forms of integration between a realm of humanities or humanistic thinking about environmental challenges with a scientific mode of thinking. Second, the chapter considers how humanities thinking can bear on action issues that arise from the situation as thus characterised. What kind of action? How can it be justified? Through which practical mechanisms can it be pursued?

This chapter synthesizes the book's arguments in a concluding discussion that brings the world of Archaic Cyprus into more substantive conversation on approaches to human-environment relationships writ large, from the horizons of eighth- and seventh-century BCE transformation across the Mediterranean to our contemporary struggles to conceptualize future triangulations of social and environmental change. It first summarizes the explanations for the settlement and land use patterns discernible in the material records from the Vasilikos and Maroni valleys, articulating local heterogeneities with signs of social inequality at the coastal town of Amathus. It then provides a hypothesis for the growth of social complexities during the Iron Age, driven by land management. Finally, Kearns contends that the Archaic countrysides of Cyprus also matter to conversations happening amongst scholars of the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, as well as broader public audiences, on the seemingly threatening mediations of society and inequality that our current climatic regimes, and the unruly Anthropocene, present.

In the introductory chapter, Kearns begins by looking closely at the Idalion Tablet, one of the surviving inscriptions from fifth-century BCE Idalion, on Cyprus, which lists land property in the territory of the town. She uses the inscription to introduce the main themes and arguments of the book. These include a focus on rural settlements and histories to complement studies of urbanism and attention to environmental changes and human experiences with climate through concepts of weathering and unruliness. To build a critical landscape archaeology, the chapter outlines approaches to ancient countrysides and human-environment relationships that push beyond narratives of societal collapse. Kearns also introduces the case study of Archaic Cyprus, a period of transformative social and environmental change, with which she will examine unruly landscapes. The chapter closes with a guide to the remaining chapters as well as a note on periodization.

John Clare’s transcription of the nightingale’s song has been praised as ‘the most accurate rendering in words of any bird’s voice for nearly a century’. But the so-called ‘peasant poet’ was not naïve. Chapter four argues that Clare’s educational background and multifarious interests in poetry, science and natural history made him singly alert to the difficulties inherent within his own attempt to ‘syllable the sounds’ of the nightingale. The chapter places Clare’s writing in a pivotal, though pre-Darwinian, stage of the ‘science of birdsong’: a period in which all kinds of ‘facts’ about birdsong were being collected, compared and vigorously disputed. Watching the bird closely as it inwardly mutters its undersong, or stammers or hurries over ill-remembered passages, Clare witnessed the kind of behaviour which would ultimately challenge the ‘foolish lyes’ uttered by both poets and philosophers regarding how and why birds sing. By exploring the deep connections which Clare draws between the ‘muttering’ of the bird while practising its songs and his own processes of composition, the chapter seeks to challenge and break down some of the binary distinctions which have framed responses to the writings of this so-called ‘peasant-poet’: ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’, ‘instinctive’ and ‘learned’, ‘spontaneous’ and ‘premeditated’ art.

Chapter 1 introduces the book's key concepts: utopianism, speculative fiction and the Anthropocene. I start by defining utopianism in terms of the "education of a desire for alternative ways of being." The chapter then shows that the current climate crisis necessitates a fundamental reorientation of our cognitive and affective frameworks. This can only be achieved, I maintain, with the help of various kinds of social dreaming, spurred by theory building and storytelling. In a second step, I discuss the background against which my analysis proceeds – the Anthropocene. In a concise fashion, different interpretations of, and objections to, the basic premise of a "human planet" are reviewed. Third, the chapter outlines the disciplinary perspectives informing this approach: political theory, utopian studies and the environmental humanities. Another section covers the book’s methodology and explains two central ideas behind my case selection: constellation and plot line. The chapter concludes with a synopsis of the ensuing argument.