In 1969, the Danish environmental organization NOAH is established, following a spectacular happening at the University of Copenhagen.
Content Index
This article examines narratives surrounding feral dogs and bison in the Western Carpathians.
Stefan Skrimshire considers the ethical question of how to communicate with future human societies in terms of long-term disposal of radioactive fuel. He proposes that the confessional form (as propagated by Saint Augustine and critiqued by Derrida) may become increasingly pertinent to activists, artists, and faith communities making sense of humanity’s ethical commitments in deep time.
Jonathan Woolley borrows the folkloristic, East Anglia figure of Black Shuck, a devilish hound, and connects it to a narrative of the Anthropocene based on the notions of inescapable mortality, deep time, and responsibility.
The authors put forward the idea of “speculative geology” to explain the violence inherent in volcanism, drawing on three volcanic episodes and the more recent unexpected striking of magma in Iceland’s Krafla volcanic caldera.
Considering Caroline Wendling’s living artwork White Wood (2014) in northeast Scotland, the author examines the relationship between deep time, ecology, and enchantment.
Christine Hansen uses the concept of deep time to challenge the idea that never-before-witnessed events are unprecedented. Using the case of a massive firestorm in 2009 in southeast Australia, she calls into question the shallow temporal frames through which deep time environmental phenomena are understood in Australian settler culture and offers an insight into often unnoticed ways in which contemporary society struggles with the colonial legacy.
The authors introduce a special section of Environmental Humanities on manifestations of deep time through places, objects, and practices, focusing on three modes through which it is encountered: enchantment, violence, and haunting.
The authors detail their experience of Puchuncavi, the largest, oldest, and most polluting industrial area in Chile. They approach it from a multidisciplinary viewpoint as an experience of the Anthropocene and advocate for an enhanced pedagogy of care born of our inherited pasts and of engagement, interest, and becoming as response-ability.
Patrick Bresnihan reveals how John Clare’s poetry challenged the naturalization of scarcity, instead describing the different natures which unfold through ongoing, negotiated, and changing relations between people and things.