Water Stories in the Anthropocene explores how climate change has emerged as a major theme in our daily lives as it poses a myriad of economic, scientific, political and cultural challenges in the age of the Anthropocene. In all its forms and manifestations, climate change is primarily a water crisis. Water scarcity, droughts, floods, deluge, rising sea levels, ice melting, wetlands loss and sea pollution are among the main threats posed by climate change, wreaking havoc on both human and nonhuman forms of life. This book engages with instances of extreme events related to water (droughts, floods, deluges) and the impact of climate change on some waterbodies (seas and wetlands) in contemporary Anglophone novels. By taking into account a corpus of novels ranging from the various areas of the Anglophone world, and thus shuttling between the Global North and the Global South, the book reads these novels as "water stories." This volume pays attention to the pervasive presence of water in all aspects of our lives, thus showing how narratives can offer insightful accounts of the present water crisis. Alternating between an econarratological perspective, reflections on the Anthropocene and the human/nonhuman imbrications within the blue humanities, the book contributes significantly to the considerations of the imaginative possibilities of these water stories, showing how narratives can offer insightful accounts of the present water crisis.

A Sámi woman studying Alaska fish populations sees our past and future through their present signs of stress and her ancestral knowledge. A teenager faces a permanent drought in Australia and her own sexual desire. An unemployed man in Wisconsin marvels as a motley parade of animals makes his trailer their portal to a world untrammeled by humans. Featuring short fiction from authors around the globe, Fire & Water: Stories from the Anthropocene takes readers on a rare journey through the physical and emotional landscape of the climate crisis--not in the future, but today. By turns frightening, confusing, and even amusing, these stories remind us how complex, and beautiful, it is to be human in these unprecedented times.

At publication date, a free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. This exciting volume presents the work and research of the Rivers of the Anthropocene Network, an international collaborative group of scientists, social scientists, humanists, artists, policy makers, and community organizers working to produce innovative transdisciplinary research on global freshwater systems. In an attempt to bridge disciplinary divides, the essays in this volume address the challenge in studying the intersection of biophysical and human sociocultural systems in the age of the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch of humans' own making. Featuring contributions from authors in a rich diversity of disciplines—from toxicology to archaeology to philosophy—this book is an excellent resource for students and scholars studying both freshwater systems and the Anthropocene.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Water is the element that, more than any other, ties human beings in to the world around them – from the oceans that surround us to the water that makes up most of our bodies. Exploring the cultural and philosophical implications of this fact, Bodies of Water develops an innovative new mode of posthuman feminist phenomenology that understands our bodies as being fundamentally part of the natural world and not separate from or privileged to it. Building on the works by Luce Irigaray, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze, Astrida Neimanis's book is a landmark study that brings a new feminist perspective to bear on ideas of embodiment and ecological ethics in the posthuman critical moment.

From Ducks, Newburyport to zombie movies and the Fast and Furious franchise, how climate anxiety permeates our culture The art and literature of our time is pregnant with catastrophe, with weather and water, wildness and weirdness. The Anthropocene - the term given to this geological epoch in which humans, anthropos, are wreaking havoc on the earth - is to be found bubbling away everywhere in contemporary cultural production. Typically, discussions of how culture registers, figures and mediates climate change focus on 'climate fiction' or 'cli-fi', but The Anthropocene Unconscious is more interested in how the Anthropocene and especially anthropogenic climate destabilisation manifests in texts that are not overtly about climate change - that is, unconsciously. The Anthropocene, Mark Bould argues, constitutes the unconscious of 'the art and literature of our time'. Tracing the outlines of the Anthropocene unconscious in a range of film, television and literature - across a range of genres and with utter disregard for high-low culture distinctions - this playful and riveting book draws out some of the things that are repressed and obscured by the term 'the Anthropocene', including capital, class, imperialism, inequality, alienation, violence, commodification, patriarchy and racial formations. The Anthropocene Unconscious is about a kind of rewriting. It asks: what happens when we stop assuming that the text is not about the anthropogenic biosphere crises engulfing us? What if all the stories we tell are stories about the Anthropocene? About climate change?

The poetry and prose collected in Plainwater are a testament to the extraordinary imagination of Anne Carson, a writer described by Michael Ondaatje as "the most exciting poet writing in English today." Succinct and astonishingly beautiful, these pieces stretch the boundaries of language and literary form, while juxtaposing classical and modern traditions. Carson envisions a present-day interview with a seventh-century BC poet, and offers miniature lectures on topics as varied as orchids and Ovid. She imagines the muse of a fifteenth-century painter attending a phenomenology conference in Italy. She constructs verbal photographs of a series of mysterious towns, and takes us on a pilgrimage in pursuit of the elusive and intimate anthropology of water. Blending the rhythm and vivid metaphor of poetry with the discursive nature of the essay, the writings in Plainwater dazzle us with their invention and enlighten us with their erudition.

This is an invitation to readers to ponder universal questions about human relations with rivers and water for the precarious times of the Anthropocene. The book asks how humans can learn through sensory embodied encounters with local waterways that shape the architecture of cities and make global connections with environments everywhere. The book considers human becomings with urban waterways to address some of the major conceptual challenges of the Anthropocene, through stories of trauma and healing, environmental activism, and encounters with the living beings that inhabit waterways. Its unique contribution is to bring together Australian Aboriginal knowledges with contemporary western, new materialist, posthuman and Deleuzean philosophies, foregrounding how visual, creative and artistic forms can assist us in thinking beyond the constraints of western thought to enable other modes of being and knowing the world for an unpredictable future. Riverlands of the Anthropocene will be of particular interest to those studying the Anthropocene through the lenses of environmental humanities, environmental education, philosophy, ecofeminism and cultural studies.

Humankind has pervasively influenced the Earth’s atmosphere, biosphere, geosphere, hydrosphere and cryosphere, arguably to the point of fashioning a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. To constrain the Anthropocene as a potential formal unit within the Geological Time Scale, a spectrum of indicators of anthropogenically-induced environmental change is considered, and shown as stratigraphical signals that may be used to characterize an Anthropocene unit, and to recognize its base. This volume describes a range of evidence that may help to define this potential new time unit and details key signatures that could be used in its definition. These signatures include lithostratigraphical (novel deposits, minerals and mineral magnetism), biostratigraphical (macro- and micro-palaeontological successions and human-induced trace fossils) and chemostratigraphical (organic, inorganic and radiogenic signatures in deposits, speleothems and ice and volcanic eruptions). We include, finally, the suggestion that humans have created a further sphere, the technosphere, that drives global change.

"This book explores humanity's increasingly stressed relationship with the world's most vital natural resource in a series of photographs made by Canadian artist, Edward Burtynsky. Over the past five years, Burtynsky has travelled across the globe, from the Gulf of Mexico to the shores of the Ganges, while weaving together an ambitious representation of water's ever more fragmented lifecycle. In colourful aerial images, many bordering on the edge of complete abstraction, Burtynsky traces the various roles that water plays in modern life; as a source of healthy ecosystems and energy, as a key element in cultural and religious rituals, and as a rapidly depleting resource. Many of the images focus our attention not on water itself but on the systems that humans have put in place in order to harness it, shape it and control it. Photographs of maze-like stepwells in India, massive dam construction and aquaculture in China, manufactured waterfront housing projects in Florida and irrigation systems in the American West are presented alongside parched landscapes, dried river regions and ominously-coloured salt and shrimp farms. Many of these photographs are Burtynzky's most abstract images yet; pivot irrigation plots are carefully crafted into totemic arrangements of geometry and dryland farming fields are transformed into dizzying collections of biomorphic forms. These images, sometimes elegant, sometimes haunting, hover between the worlds of painting and photography, forming a compelling global portrait of water that functions as an open-ended question about humanity's past, present, and future relationship with the natural world."--Book jacket.

A science journalist travels the world to explore humanity’s ecological devastation—and its potential for renewal in this “compelling read” (Guardian, UK). We live in times of profound environmental change. According to a growing scientific consensus, the dramatic results of man-made climate change have ushered the world into a new geological era: the Anthropocene, or Age of Man. As an editor at Nature, Gaia Vince couldn’t help but wonder if the greatest cause of this dramatic planetary change—humans’ singular ability to adapt and innovate—might also hold the key to our survival. To investigate this provocative question, Vince travelled the world in search of ordinary people making extraordinary changes to the way they live—and, in many cases, finding new ways to thrive. From Nepal to Patagonia and beyond, Vince journeys into mountains and deserts, forests and farmlands, to get an up close and personal view of our changing environment. Part science journal, part travelogue, Adventures in the Anthropocene recounts Vince’s journey, and introduces an essential new perspective on the future of life on Earth.