The Introduction defines the book’s major concepts, such as belonging with, elucidates its major keywords – movement, listening, radiance, resuscitating, restoring, and recycling, and explains its foundational ideas and methodology. These intertwine feminist, historical, ecological, and subject–object analyses to underpin how diminishing women and objects is a related activity. Second, it establishes how texts heal injurious mergings between women and matter and jettison the supposed “female virtues” – dissimulation and passivity – in order to embrace actual ethical beliefs and independence, reconnect women’s corporeality, reason, spirit, sexuality, and virtue, rendering these cooperating, rather than sparring, bodies. Third, it argues that these materialist ethics reveal how consumption can be constructive, a finding that disputes mainstream concerns that women were merely thoughtless consumers. Finally, it illuminates how the political and personal need to incarnate ideals by rendering concrete such abstractions as the “rights of man” entwines with gender debates and subject–object explorations during the revolutionary years.

Chapter 5 argues that in Burney’s Evelina and The Wanderer hats become a kinesthetic means for women’s metamorphosis and for asserting rights laws do not ensure when characters employ them to hide their faces and thereby establish some security from aggressive male intrusion and threatening social expectations, a use which reveals consumption’s positive aspects by linking fashion and necessity. This chapter explores how, in both novels, hats positively facilitate nonrecognition by shrouding or changing the face, allowing women to assert the right to privacy: the liberty they experience allows for self-recognition. Smith’s Desmond, in contrast, offers instances in which characters fail to recognize and to belong with the human and nonhuman, while their very lapse inspires other characters’ (and readers’) recognition of how vital that communion is, especially regarding ecological preservation. One of this chapter’s largest concerns addresses the relationship between characters’ ability to pay attention to things and their potential capacity to secure justice for themselves.

Brief introduction to applications of bacteria in food, petrochemicals, photonics, water purification and ecology.

In contrast to anthropocentric readings of the Georgics, chapter 3 argues that Vergil is interested in farming as a way of considering the entangled lives of humans and nonhumans. The chapter contextualizes Vergil’s ecological thinking – highlighting influences from ancient philosophy, ethnography, Hesiod, and Roman agricultural treatises – and differentiates this reading from interpretations that shoehorn the relations of humans and nonhumans into a nature–culture binary. The chapter examines how the poem discloses agriculture as a practice of managing ecological relations. The second half of the chapter then queries the status of the human within its ecologies. While much of the poem denies human exceptionality, it does recognize ways in which humans stand out from the rest of the world, above all in their unparalleled ability to transform their environments – epitomized by the world-altering activities of Rome and Caesar. Ultimately, the chapter connects the peculiar status of the human to the didactic aims of the poem. By relaying and explaining the signa of the world, the Georgics offers the fantasy of an expertise that can better embed humans in their environments.

This book begins with a close examination of Cochin’s natural environment. Barring some notable exceptions, histories of port cities have either completely neglected or failed to adequately engage with the coastal environments within which such cities are located. This has been an unfortunate omission since port cities have of course been fundamentally shaped by environmental transformations. In Cochin, the harbour’s very birth is often attributed to a flood that is said to have swept through the coast in the fourteenth century. Memories of this flood have lingered along the volatile coastline as has the fate of its most prominent casualty, the ancient city of Muziris, which is said to have been destroyed by the very same waters that gave birth to Cochin. From the colonial period onwards, therefore, the eventful history of Cochin’s coastline had begun to attract considerable interest and scrutiny. Through a focus on the discussions surrounding the port’s coastline, this chapter will examine how perceptions of the port’s environment intersected with visions for its development over the course of the late nineteenth century.

The introduction calls for a mutually enriching dialogue between ancient texts and environmental literary criticism, contextualizing the book in relation to ecocriticism and classical scholarship. It also establishes the key terms of the book’s approach – place, environment, and ecology – and distinguishes these from the unreflective use of the concept of nature. Finally, the introduction sketches the contextual background for Vergil’s and Horace’s environmental interests, noting a range of ancient traditions and discourses that took the nonhuman world seriously as a site of interest and inquiry. These include literary forebears like Sappho, Hesiod, Theocritus, and Lucretius; cultural traditions such as the Roman fascination with land surveying and agricultural treatises; political contexts like the expansion and consolidation of a quasi-global Roman empire; philosophical traditions from the Presocratics to Stoicism and Epicureanism; and religious traditions. Reading Horace and Vergil as environmental poets does not mean projecting modern sensibilities onto ancient texts but rather seeing how these authors pursue their own, different interests in place, ecology, and the environment.

The Introduction provides a theoretical and conceptual framework of the book by defining ecological disequilibrium and slow violence. It also provides a historiographical discussion on collective violence against Armenians in the late Ottoman Empire.

This chapter explores the relationship between Christianity and ecology in Clare’s poetry, letters, and biblical paraphrases. Critics tend to secularize Clare’s writing and so overlook its biblical, religious, and metaphysical content. The chapter redresses this by assessing Clare’s early Christian faith, his relationship to Wesleyan Methodism and the Ranters, his distrust of organized religion, and his divine ecology as an expression of rural Christianity. Clare looks beyond pantheism and natural religion to identify an interwoven and sacred creation inseparable from the parish. As such, Clare valued Christianity as a ‘religion that teaches us to act justly to speak truth & love mercy’, a social and ecological politics embedded in prayer, mystery, scripture, and faith.

This chapter locates a shift in beginning in the seventh century in which the power to halt quakes began to move away from collective repentance and toward saintly intercession. First, it examines the seventh-century Life of St. Symeon Stylites the Younger, a Syrian pillar saint with ties to Constantinople. It focuses in particular on hymns recorded in the Life for earthquakes that purportedly caused them to cease when sung by the holy man. The chapter shows how seventh-century Byzantines could have constructed the role of the saintly intercessor when faced with natural disasters. Next, it analyzes changes in Constantinople’s earthquake commemoration rite in the eighth century, specifically the introduction of the Theotokos as the city’s chief protection against earthquakes. Eighth-century liturgical editors borrowed from the rites commemorating the enemy invasions of Constantinople in 623, 626, and 717–18, in which the Theotokos was remembered to play a prominent role in protecting the city. It shows how the earthquake commemoration liturgy no longer saw earthquakes as divine judgment against the sin of the city, but as outside threats to the city for which powerful heavenly intercessions were needed.

This chapter discusses how East Roman emperors utilized the theology of divine chastisement, particularly the efficacy accorded to repentance, to their advantage. During the earthquakes of 396 and 447, Emperors Arcadius and Theodosius II, respectively, led mass penitential rituals and performed public acts of humility until the quakes ceased. Such public acts of repentance posed a political risk to emperors since they could appear to confirm their responsibility for the disasters. However, imperial supporters like bishop Severian of Gabala and historian Socrates Scholasticus highlighted the quakes’ cessation rather than their cause, and located the power to halt quakes in the humble prayers of the rulers themselves rather than worshippers as a collective. In the aftermath of these earthquakes, authorities framed Roman emperors as “New Davids” – effective spiritual intercessors as well as military protectors – inaugurating a biblical typology for emperors that would continue throughout Byzantine history.

This chapter identifies the longstanding correspondence between the Anglo-Irish novelist, Maria Edgeworth, and the Jewish-American schoolteacher, Rachel Mordecai, as a transnational conduit of ecological inquiry. By teasing out the vagaries and idiosyncrasies of this transatlantic relationship (which lasted almost a quarter of a century), this chapter renders visible a minor tributary of transnational exchange that operated at the peripheries of the nineteenth century’s global power nexus. Both Edgeworth and Mordecai inhabited anomalous social positions and geographical locales, yet their shared ecological interests enabled them to contribute to wider channels of knowledge and experience in the period. Rather than celebrate their relationship as a triumph of lateral transnational exchange, however, the chapter exposes the complex power dynamics that simultaneously undergird and undermine their ecological collaboration. The correspondents’ mutual commitment to Enlightenment ecology may have engendered an invigorating intellectual exchange, but its limits and exclusions are witnessed most acutely in their nervous reflections upon slavery in the wake of the Nat Turner Rebellion of 1831. Even in its attempts to process and interpret Black resistance to slavery, their correspondence colludes to suppress the revolutionary potential of Turner’s alternative ecology.

This chapter concerns Constantinople’s liturgical rite for the commemoration of earthquakes in its original, fifth-century form. Celebrated each year on the anniversary of certain quakes, worshippers ritually reenacted local earthquakes, performing a long, penitential procession that retraced the earthquake evacuation route. The rite was structured by biblical readings, hymns, and prayers that framed the people of Constantinople as the sinful, biblical people of God. In ritual performance, worshippers could envision quakes as manifestations of divine wrath against the sins of the city, and their collective repentance as effective in restoring stability to the earth and balance within the human-environment-divine relationship. After discussing the liturgical rite, its performance, and theology, the chapter locates the origins of its theology of divine chastisement in local homilies and ritual responses to earlier quakes, focusing in particular on the archbishop John Chrysostom’s Constantinopolitan homilies on earthquakes from the early fifth century.

This chapter examines the ways in which Byzantine political and ecclesiastical elites recast local earthquakes as divine blessing upon the city rather than manifestations of divine wrath as evinced in the liturgical commemoration rite. First, it examines a legend that arose in connection with the earthquake of 438 that framed it as a divine theophany. Following the divisive Council of Chalcedon in 451, ecclesiastical authorities in Constantinople’s imperial church used the legend against their miaphysite opponents to cast the quake as divine approval of Constantinople’s political and theological claims. Next, it turns to the earthquake of 557, which partially destroyed the famous church of Hagia Sophia built by the emperor Justinian in 537. Justinian rebuilt the church in 562 and held an elaborate ceremony complete with a liturgy of rededication for the church. This ceremony and its liturgy eschewed the theology of divine chastisement and framed the quake as a temporary setback, an opportunity for Justinian to display his prowess over the destructive effects of nature by rebuilding the church to be more magnificent than before.

This chapter describes how medieval Constantinople ceased to commemorate new local earthquakes on its liturgical calendar and instead crafted new ways of responding liturgically to seismicity. First it discusses new liturgical hymnography added to the commemoration rite for the quake of October 26, 740, and the establishment of that day as an annual “earthquake day” on which worshippers could reflect on natural disaster in the abstract, even as the hymns presented an incoherent set of conflicting theologies of earthquakes. It then examines how earthquakes from the distant past became potent ideological symbols in this period. It concludes with an examination of a prayer from the late eighth century created for use whenever earthquakes struck, a form of liturgical response that came to replace the practice of commemorating new quakes.

This chapter outlines the different conceptual frameworks that can be used to better understand the evolving role nature has played in cities. It distinguishes between socioecological systems and urban political ecology, each of which influence how nature has been regarded and treated in different time periods and urban settings. It seeks to provide an overview of these concepts and explain their implications for how urban nature and nature-based solutions are constructed and viewed today as an urban policy issue. The chapter presents different approaches to understanding urban nature, nature-based solutions, and the relationship between nature and cities. It also discusses the emergence of urban nature and nature-based solutions as a response to urban sustainability challenges. The chapter engages with two case studies to illustrate its key messages: Urban Forest Strategy in Melbourne, Australia, and the Eco-Valley of Tianjin Eco-City in Tianjin, China.