{"title":"REVIEW: Walden’s Shore: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Science (2014) by Robert M. Thorson","authors":"Yeojin Kim","doi":"10.60162/swamphen.6.11544","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.60162/swamphen.6.11544","url":null,"abstract":"Robert M. Thorson draws on the methodologies of bibliography studies, Ecocriticism, and the history of geology, and investigates another aspect of Thoreau’s career – that of a field geologist with a keen insight into the glaciated landscape of Concord during the late Pleistocene.","PeriodicalId":197436,"journal":{"name":"Swamphen: a Journal of Cultural Ecology (ASLEC-ANZ)","volume":"43 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115666638","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Poetry as Investigative Pedagogy: Issues of Ethics and Praxis in Hay and Thorne’s Last Days of the Mill, 2012.","authors":"P. Hay","doi":"10.60162/swamphen.6.11514","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.60162/swamphen.6.11514","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines dilemmas of ethics and practice in the author’s co-written Last Days of the Mill (2012). The usefulness of poetry as a tool of social inquiry is considered, both in the immediate context of a dying pulp mill in an industrial town in northern Tasmania, and the wider symbolic import of the mill’s demise within an island wedded to an unrealisable vision of industrial greatness. It is argued that there are forms of knowing in which poetry is far more efficacious than analytical prose, most notably elusive and grounded understandings such as ‘being there-ness’, and the accretion of a vividly storied mindscape expressed through the spoken word. The paper then considers the injunction of the Canadian poet, Robert Bringhurst – that ‘when he sees his people destroying the world, the poet can say, “we’re destroying the world”. He can say it in narrative or lyric or dramatic or meditative form, tragic or ironic form, short or long form . . . But he cannot lie, as a poet . . . ’ The paper argues for a more nuanced and inclusivist ethic, even when, technically speaking, this requires an act of dissimulation on the part of the poet. ","PeriodicalId":197436,"journal":{"name":"Swamphen: a Journal of Cultural Ecology (ASLEC-ANZ)","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116246813","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Australian Tongue and Ag-gag Law","authors":"Iris Ralph","doi":"10.60162/swamphen.6.11520","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.60162/swamphen.6.11520","url":null,"abstract":"In this essay, I comment on two histories of animal farming in Australia in an ecocritical reading of several works of Australian literature: Tim Winton’s novel Shallows (1984), Susan Hawthorne’s collection of poetry, Cow (2011) and Francesca Rendle-Short’s novel Bite Your Tongue (2011). The first of those histories, the background of Shallows, refers to the whaling industry that operated in Western Australian waters up through the 1970s and the growing public awareness of that industry that eventually drove it to a halt in 1978, the year the main events of the novel take place. Cow and Bite Your Tongue, the texts that I mostly discuss, carry references to the history of industrial farming of cows in Australia, which, along with the industrial farming of other domesticated animal species, exploded after 1970 (in Australia and elsewhere in urban-industrialising countries), the same decade when Australians were beginning to rally behind animal rights activists’ opposition to whale slaughter. Today, almost half a century later, animal advocacy activists continue to raise pressing questions about animal species that are industrially farmed. They are doing so at the same time as the meat industry is attempting to restrict public access to and information about its operations. I address those questions in my reading of Hawthorne’s paean to cows and Rendle-Short’s references to the Moral Right movement in Queensland in the 1970s and attempts by its supporters to remove works of literature from school book shelves.","PeriodicalId":197436,"journal":{"name":"Swamphen: a Journal of Cultural Ecology (ASLEC-ANZ)","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125504257","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"REVIEW: The Broken Promise of Agricultural Progress by Cameron Muir","authors":"Barbara Holloway","doi":"10.60162/swamphen.6.11354","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.60162/swamphen.6.11354","url":null,"abstract":"Though not ecocriticism, this is an important work for anyone working anywhere on representation of the inter-being of natural and cultivated worlds. It shows the health of a bioregion changing through social, political, natural, economic and scientific influences from local, national and global sources. Muir’s primary focus is the dynamics of ‘agricultural progress’, a concept that so often results in damaging exploitation of earth and ecosystems.","PeriodicalId":197436,"journal":{"name":"Swamphen: a Journal of Cultural Ecology (ASLEC-ANZ)","volume":"39 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116494080","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"'Global Warming is a headf**k': using cultural journalism and oral history to engage with the lived experiences of climate change","authors":"T. Doig","doi":"10.60162/swamphen.6.11018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.60162/swamphen.6.11018","url":null,"abstract":"Climate change is arguably the most mind-bendingly complex of all conundrums the world has to contend with. It presents an urgent, yet paralysing, situation that simultaneously demands and eludes all manner of totalising solutions. Even the phrase ‘super wicked problem’ with its hyperbolic compound adjective, however, fails to fully convey the visceral and ambivalent effects/affects that climate change provokes in people on a daily basis. Using long-form cultural journalism, oral history and case studies as the primary methodological practice, this paper investigates climate change responses from interviewees belonging to the segment of society that Leiserowitz et al describe as ‘the Alarmed’ (5). Furthermore, I contend that there is a vulgar neologism that better captures how ‘ordinary people’ often experience the super wicked problem of life under climate change: headfuck.","PeriodicalId":197436,"journal":{"name":"Swamphen: a Journal of Cultural Ecology (ASLEC-ANZ)","volume":"78 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126584709","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Haunting of Agent Orange within the Waters of Rivers and Bodies for Vietnamese Australians","authors":"Boi Huyen Ngo","doi":"10.60162/swamphen.6.11477","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.60162/swamphen.6.11477","url":null,"abstract":"In the context of climate change and the inevitable future of climate change refugees, there is the need to explore the intrinsic connection between migrants and their connection to the environment, particularly when they are changing environments (their biogregion), and homelands. This paper uses case study methodology in its examination of Agent Orange within the waters of Vietnam and Australia; it attempts to understand the haunting and the affects of water contamination within lived experiences of (un)belonging. Agent Orange was used by the U.S military in Vietnam as part of the herbicidal warfare program called Operation Ranch Hand. The Union Carbide Corporation chemical plant, which had produced Agent Orange for the Vietnam War, had one plant situated in Sydney, Australia by the Parramatta River. Parramatta River is a river in Western Sydney where many Vietnamese migrants, including my family, live. It is a popular landmark for picnics and events for Vietnamese families. The haunting upon my family, once they realised the presence of Agent Orange within the waters of their new homeland, has brought strong visceral and sensory memories of their experiences of the war and of migration. Their migration experience has taken a circular route, akin to the water contamination: Agent Orange has been produced in Australia, released in Vietnam and contaminated (and continues to contaminate) both Australia and Vietnam. Although they escaped Vietnam as refugees sailing on a boat across the waters, Agent Orange also has travelled, present within the waters in the river systems of both countries. Agent Orange's deadly legacy, ecocide, haunts Australian Vietnamese beyond physical and geographical space and time.","PeriodicalId":197436,"journal":{"name":"Swamphen: a Journal of Cultural Ecology (ASLEC-ANZ)","volume":"55 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132544390","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"REVIEW: 'What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions? by Vinciane Despret","authors":"H. Tiffin","doi":"10.60162/swamphen.6.11540","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.60162/swamphen.6.11540","url":null,"abstract":"Vinciane Despret's What Would Animals Say if We Asked the Right Questions? (with its Foreword by Bruno Latour), offers an engaging and convincing empiricist challenge to accepted scientific beliefs about the ‘natural’ world, animals, and animal behaviours.","PeriodicalId":197436,"journal":{"name":"Swamphen: a Journal of Cultural Ecology (ASLEC-ANZ)","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124467574","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Under the Signs of Ecocriticism: An Interview with Professor Scott Slovic, Universiti Putra Malaysia","authors":"Sayyed Ali Mirenayat, Elaheh Soofastaei","doi":"10.60162/swamphen.6.11545","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.60162/swamphen.6.11545","url":null,"abstract":"In this broad-ranging yet incisive interview, Prof. Scott Slovic answers some essential questions about ecocriticism, environment, and nature in fiction and nonfiction. As professor of literature and environment at the University of Idaho and author of more than 250 articles about environmental literature, he is ideally placed to respond to overarching questions about the field, its history and its current and future directions. Prof. Slovic has also published 25 books in the area, including, most recently, Ecocriticism of the Global South (co-edited with Swarnalatha Rangarajan and Vidya Sarveswaran, 2015), Numbers and Nerves: Information, Emotion, and Meaning in a World of Data (co-authored with Paul Slovic, 2015), and Ecocritical Aesthetics: Literature, Beauty, and the Environment (co-edited with Peter Quigley, forthcoming 2017). He has edited the journal ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment since 1995 and is co-editor of Routledge’s new World Literatures and the Environment Series.","PeriodicalId":197436,"journal":{"name":"Swamphen: a Journal of Cultural Ecology (ASLEC-ANZ)","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121852300","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Green Man: the desire for deeper connections with nature","authors":"Prudence Gibson","doi":"10.60162/swamphen.6.11398","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.60162/swamphen.6.11398","url":null,"abstract":"In an epoch of compromised ecologies and parallel changes in human perceptions of nature, this paper charts the development of the Green Man or Foliate Face in art and architecture. The Green Man first appeared in France in the 1st century and flourished in British architecture in the 11–15th centuries. This pagan character was a Wildman, worshipped as both an apotropaic and benevolent spirit, associated with fertility. This paper provokes an inquiry into whether the leafy extrusions from Green Man’s mouth are a form of nonhuman desiring language, a means of communicating with the plant world, or merely a site of vegetal genesis and agency. In contemporary visual art, the concept of the Green Man or the hybrid plant–animal has emerged anew, no doubt in response to climate change fears and diminishing ecodiversities. Edourdo Kac’s 'Enigma', for instance, is a genetically modified petunia flower, created from Kac’s DNA, combining human and plant genes in the one plant. This paper draws on the plant philosophy of Michael Marder and traces the Green Man plant–human hybrid into the present, as a means of documenting the way nature thinks through humans.","PeriodicalId":197436,"journal":{"name":"Swamphen: a Journal of Cultural Ecology (ASLEC-ANZ)","volume":"67 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115901634","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Country and climate change in Alexis Wright's 'The Swan Book'.","authors":"Jane Gleeson-White","doi":"10.60162/swamphen.6.11503","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.60162/swamphen.6.11503","url":null,"abstract":"Alexis Wright’s novel, The Swan Book (2013), set one hundred years in the future on a climate-changed Earth, introduces a new note into her fiction: that of doubt about hope. Extending postcolonial discussions of Wright’s fiction, this essay uses ecocriticism to consider Country and climate change in this novel. It argues that the element of doubt about hope, of despair even, evident in The Swan Book derives from the fact that for the first time in Wright’s fiction the essence of the land—Country—has been altered, by anthropogenically-caused climate change. Drawing on the work of ecocritics Timothy Clark and Adam Trexler, the essay argues that to engage with climate change Wright has introduced formal innovations in her novel; and more overtly figured Western culture in terms of its global manifestation, that is, as Christianity conflated with capitalism. I argue that The Swan Book writes a book of Country into the Christian and other stories of the planet, telling a new story of the earth for an age of climate change.","PeriodicalId":197436,"journal":{"name":"Swamphen: a Journal of Cultural Ecology (ASLEC-ANZ)","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129976433","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}