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Introduction to Special Issue: The Function of Ecocriticism; or, Ecocriticism, What Is It Good For?
No full textHow effectual is ecocriticism at practically addressing our most pressing and poignant global environmental issues? What hope through words? We organized this special issue of the Journal of Ecocriticism to consider the application and relevance of our-kind-of-thing, this marriage between words, texts, and earth; between criticism and trees; between the library carrel and the Greenland ice sheet. Tasked to consider how such a project operates within the strictures of ephemeral literary criticism while simultaneously considering what happens on the ground, “The Function of Ecocriticism” demands that its contributors juggle the competing burdens of rhetoric and activism, and reflect on whether the modus operandi of the former has any purchase on the ethical demands of the latter. We fear, however, that our efforts in this endeavor come to more of the same: words upon words, while elsewhere the fearsome and composed economic imperatives that brought us to this place at this time charge ever onward. This ecocritical experiment surely forces us to ask an obvious but no less difficult question: Are we also part of the problem? Each contributor to this volume—like all ecocritics—must tackle the inevitable: What is to be done? That they do so in such disparate ways points to the lively welter that is ecocriticism, as well as to the white noise of ecocide that hums in the not-so-distant background
Climate Change Subsystem Structure and Change: Network Mapping, Density and Centrality
Get PDFPolicy capacity in web-based settings is largely the
product of nodality, which provides centralized actors with
enhanced opportunities to detect information and affect
behavior. This paper examines four Canadian virtual policy
networks (VPN) currently facing policy challenges associated
with climate change adaptation including finance, infrastructure,
transportation, and forestry. The four sectors each
face specific types of challenges that will presumably influence
government’s policy capacity to respond to climate
change adaptation, which in turn will affect the state’s nodal
positioning in the VPNs. At the macro level governing capacity
will vary considerably among these sectors with some
more able to affect social behavior and evidence-informed
learning, while others will struggle to lead policy discourse
and development. It is hypothesized that the Canadian federal
government’s nodality, which is shaped by both reputational
capital and information credibility, will also be influenced
by the nature of actors involved and the degree to
which the VPN is internationalized
The Misrecognised as the Least the Advantaged Citizens in Plural Democracies
Get PDFJohn Rawls’s “Justice as Fairness” is the most systematic attempt in recent decades to provide a liberal grounding for justice in plural democratic societies. Rawls argued that social and economic inequalities are justifiable only if they are to the advantage of society’s least-advantaged members. Rawls argued that the least-advantaged position in society was occupied by the citizen with the lowest expectation for primary social goods (all-purpose means like income and opportunity). This paper argues that the least-advantaged citizens, in part, are those whose identities are misrecognised. Misrecognition of identity can cause harm; it can restrict the agency and opportunity of the misrecognised. Minority identity groups (whose identities are often misrecognised) do not do as well as others citizens in social, economic and political terms. This paper argues that the misrecognition of identity constitutes unreasonable democratic practice because it can harm members of minority identity groups
Handley, George B. New World Poetics: Nature and the Adamic Imagination of Whitman, Neruda, and Walcott. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2007.
Get PDFWither Ecocriticism in the Era of the Hyperobject? A Review of Timothy Morton’s Ecology without Nature and The Ecological Thought.
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Oehlschlaeger, Fritz. The Achievement of Wendell Berry: The Hard History of Love. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2011
Get PDFInstitutionalized Inhibition: Examining Constraints on Climate Change Policy Capacity in the Transport Departments of Ontario and British Columbia, Canada
Get PDFThis paper examines the interaction between
transportation policy and climate change policy in two Canadian
provinces, British Columbia and Ontario. The concept
of policy capacity is used to qualitatively measure the
effectiveness of instruments in advancing goals in an area
where established policy paradigms may not be congruent
with new initiatives. A review of official policy documents
and budgetary information on policy-related spending, as
well as primary interviews with policy managers in relevant
provincial ministries, reveals that overlapping policy goals
and instruments may have created a situation of institutionalized
policy inhibition, in which conflicting layers of policy
goals and instruments constrain the available policy capacity
