{"title":"The Victorian Anthropocene: George Marsh and the Tangled Bank of Darwinian Environmentalism","authors":"J. Plotz","doi":"10.60162/swamphen.4.10620","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.60162/swamphen.4.10620","url":null,"abstract":"There is an important 19th century turning-point in thinking about the Anthropocene. Vermont environmentalist George Marsh's 1864 Man and Nature: or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action is a seminal account of how the unintended consequences of human action give humans a previously unsuspected role to play in secular terrestrial change. The role that Darwinian 'natural materialism' played in shaping Marsh's insights is profound, and grasping the particular developments in biological thinking that made his work feasible casts a useful side-light on our own current assumptions about humanity's relationship to the environment, and suggests some ways of thinking about which of those assumptions have the potential to shape further thought and large-scale human action. ","PeriodicalId":197436,"journal":{"name":"Swamphen: a Journal of Cultural Ecology (ASLEC-ANZ)","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126360248","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":"Learning to Read Country: Bruce Pascoe’s Earth, an Indigenous Ecological Allegory","authors":"Davy Fonteyn","doi":"10.60162/swamphen.4.10619","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.60162/swamphen.4.10619","url":null,"abstract":"Allegories contain specific forms and techniques which define a text as an allegory, including an intention written into the text. The reader is required to make an effort to determine that intention if they are to uncover the allegory. Also, allegories function didactically to educate the reader in a certain way, and, through that education, transform the reader. This is the traditional function of allegory.In this paper, I read Bruce Pascoe’s 2001 novel, Earth, as an example of what I term an ‘Indigenous ecological allegory’. The novel encodes in allegorical form an Indigenous worldview of the natural world. Many theorists agree that such a worldview can broadly be termed ecological. The didactic principle is to educate the reader about this Indigenous worldview of Country. As the reader comes to an understanding of Country, the narrative events, which describe a colonial (1880s) war between non-indigenous and indigenous people, as well as the language that encodes those events, become re-interpreted through this alternative metaphysics. What emerges is a possibility for the overturning of incipient dualism. The growth in the reader’s knowledge of Country opens the way to mutual acceptance. Country makes welcome all people to its land on the provision of respect and a commitment to its care.Pascoe’s novel utilises medieval allegorical forms, techniques and strategies in order to expose the narratives and language of the Australian Tradition to the language of the ‘other’ of Indigenous Country, that is (more specifically) the Wathaurong language and worldview that it encodes. The allegorical techniques include a cyclic narrative structure involving a Threshold scene followed by related scenes and commentary, direct address to the reader, narrative digression, debate, allegorical names and puns. Using these techniques, Pascoe uncovers a polysemy that has developed within the English language in its encounter with the Indigenous people. Finally, while allegory has yet to be studied in ecocrticisim as a form for writing nature, I argue that it is an ideal literary form in which Nature and an ecological worldview may be portrayed in a written text. ","PeriodicalId":197436,"journal":{"name":"Swamphen: a Journal of Cultural Ecology (ASLEC-ANZ)","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126245844","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":"Bioregional Biography and the Geography of Affect: Spatialised Somnambulance in Alice Oswald's Sleepwalk on the Severn","authors":"T. Bristow","doi":"10.60162/swamphen.4.10617","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.60162/swamphen.4.10617","url":null,"abstract":"At the centre of Oswald’s second book-length poem, Sleepwalk on the Severn (2009), lies a conflation of the feminine gendered moon and an elderly woman dressed in black, pictured against rainfall at night. Distinctions of kind and various senses of incongruence are evident markers in the text that denotes changeability of humans in the unfixed environment. It is with a sensitivity to our own understanding of the hydrologic cycle and our planet’s relation to its moon that Oswald deconstructs textual markers of subject positions; in Sleepwalk identity—individual and communal—is aligned to poetic voice, which in itself is impressionable and unfixed, subject to specific situations in which the text and space are imbricated, one with the other. This essay argues that environmentally emplaced affect can be located through an attention to Oswald’s concrete, spatialised ecopoetic ‘registers’ (voices) and an undulating, accumulative literary score that underpin Sleepwalk’s geographic imaginary.","PeriodicalId":197436,"journal":{"name":"Swamphen: a Journal of Cultural Ecology (ASLEC-ANZ)","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129633015","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":"Green Sense: the Aesthetics of Plants, Place and Language by John Ryan","authors":"Barbara Holloway","doi":"10.60162/swamphen.4.10621","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.60162/swamphen.4.10621","url":null,"abstract":"Review of John Ryan's Green Sense: the Aesthetics of Plants, Place and Language (2012): a study situated in the Western Australia region.","PeriodicalId":197436,"journal":{"name":"Swamphen: a Journal of Cultural Ecology (ASLEC-ANZ)","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130512860","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":"Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green by Jeffery Jerome Cohen","authors":"Nicholas Kankahainen","doi":"10.60162/swamphen.4.10622","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.60162/swamphen.4.10622","url":null,"abstract":"As a collective, the essays in Prismatic Ecology mark an inspiring new direction in ecophilosophical and ecocritical thinking. With caution towards viewing ecology (solely) in terms of ‘green’, Prismatic Ecology is a timely encouragement to think carefully about the symbols we use to represent the world, whilst finding within the colour spectrum a range of motifs to express and drive different ways of thinking about human and other-than-human interaction.","PeriodicalId":197436,"journal":{"name":"Swamphen: a Journal of Cultural Ecology (ASLEC-ANZ)","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126476229","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":"Site Fidelity: Rock Pigeons and Refugees","authors":"L. Bleach","doi":"10.60162/swamphen.4.10618","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.60162/swamphen.4.10618","url":null,"abstract":"This paper presents a series of multi-disciplinary artworks developed from collaborations with local Tasmanian pigeon fanciers and homing associations. The artworks explore the desire to locate habitat in unstable environments, exposing bespoke ecosystems and visualising agency within a locational / relational feedback loop. The homing instinct of the rock pigeon is segued into the loss of home felt by local refugees. The wild rock pigeons' cohabitation with humans 10 000 years ago triggered a unique and mutually beneficial association, allowing safe shelter for bird and unprecedented carrier utility for human. The enduring relationship between bird and human has evolved in response to the pigeon's homing instinct, evidencing an empathetic bond driven by an urge to continually re-establish contact.Homing is an innate instinct to return to known territory via new and unknown environments. The contemporary bird / fancier relationship reveals layers of belonging, between animal, human and place. It more abstractly reflects a desire to be local; to belong within an emotional and spatial system, confronting and navigating tenuous places and experiences. Pigeon fanciers typically inhabit suburban environments, establishing the birds' lofts amongst the conglomerate nest of human habitation (sheds, carports, BBQ areas, clotheslines). From this domestic grotto, fanciers travel impressive distances to reach wilder places, releasing their birds to find their way back home. The bird's instinct of site fidelity sits counter to the fancier's instinct to reconnect to wild environs. It is a symbiotic relationship drawn from divergent urges. ","PeriodicalId":197436,"journal":{"name":"Swamphen: a Journal of Cultural Ecology (ASLEC-ANZ)","volume":"82 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114812498","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":"Regarding the Earth: Ecological Vision in Word & Image","authors":"K. Rigby, L. Williams","doi":"10.60162/swamphen.3.10601","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.60162/swamphen.3.10601","url":null,"abstract":"Special Issue editors, Professor Kate Rigby and Associate Professor Linda Williams, introduce papers arising from the 5th Biennial conference, ‘Regarding the Earth: Ecological Vision in Word and Vision'. Participants in this issue were asked to consider the ecological implications of different ways of perceiving, imagining, valuing and representing Earth, whether understood as planet, place or collective, comprising a multiplicity of more-than-human entities, agencies and processes. ","PeriodicalId":197436,"journal":{"name":"Swamphen: a Journal of Cultural Ecology (ASLEC-ANZ)","volume":"41 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127019207","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":"Locating Science Fiction. Andrew Milner.","authors":"C. Rigby","doi":"10.60162/swamphen.3.10615","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.60162/swamphen.3.10615","url":null,"abstract":"Review of Locating Science Fiction. Andrew Milner. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012. Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies, 44. Hardback. 244 pp. ISBN 978-1-84631-842-1 ","PeriodicalId":197436,"journal":{"name":"Swamphen: a Journal of Cultural Ecology (ASLEC-ANZ)","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-12-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128094828","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":"Animalising Art: Rainer Maria Rilke and Franz Marc","authors":"L. Fischer","doi":"10.60162/swamphen.3.10605","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.60162/swamphen.3.10605","url":null,"abstract":"This article discusses affinities and connections between Rilke's 'animal poetry' and Franz Marc's paintings, as well as the ecocritical potential and challenges of their works.","PeriodicalId":197436,"journal":{"name":"Swamphen: a Journal of Cultural Ecology (ASLEC-ANZ)","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131623749","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":"Thinking Long/Thinking Ecologically: Time Travel, Film and Ecological Agency in 12 Monkeys","authors":"E. Nicoletti","doi":"10.60162/swamphen.3.10614","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.60162/swamphen.3.10614","url":null,"abstract":"This discussion focuses on philosophical understandings and aesthetic representations of the ecological interrelatedness of temporally distant past and future worlds. It does so through an analysis of Terry Gilliam’s dystopian time travel film 12 Monkeys (1996), which features intersections between the deterioration of the subject and the environment. The essay considers this film in relation to Timothy Morton’s notion of ‘thinking big’ (The Ecological Thought) and Gilles Deleuze’s notion of time as repeated difference (Difference and Repetition). This discussion argues that 12 Monkeys both stages and interrogates Morton’s concept through its time travel narrative and filmic techniques. Furthermore, it suggests that from this reading emerges the possibility of seeing the medium of film itself as a catalyst prompting ecological thinking and agency.","PeriodicalId":197436,"journal":{"name":"Swamphen: a Journal of Cultural Ecology (ASLEC-ANZ)","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-12-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122889938","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}