Overview
- Provides a unique exploration of the alliances between fire and plants, plants and humans, and humans and fire
- Offers a cross-disciplinary opportunity to think about the agency and inter dependencies of humans, other-than-humans, elements and material ecologies in the disciplines of human geography and art history
- Drawing on conversations with people who have experienced bushfires, and placing these narratives alongside discussions of contemporary art, the book provides insights into how relationships come to be and are likely to change due to interdependencies between fire, plants and human existence in the Anthropocene
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About this book
This book explores how fire, plants and people coexist in the Anthropocene. In a time of dramatic environmental transformation, the authors examine how human impacts on the planetary system are being felt at all levels from the geological and the arboreal to the atmospheric. The book brings together the disciplines of human geography and art history to examine fire-plant-people alliances and multispecies world-making. The authors listen carefully to the narratives of bushfire survivors. They embrace the responses of contemporary artists, as practice becomes interwoven with fire as well as ruin and regrowth. Through visual, textual and felt ways of being, the chapters illuminate, illustrate, impress and imprint the imagined and actual agency of plants and people within a changing climate — from Aboriginal ecocultural burning to nuclear fire. By holding grief and enacting hope, the book shows how relationships come to be and are likely to change due to the interdependencies of fire, plants and people in the Anthropocene.
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Keywords
Table of contents (7 chapters)
Reviews
“Alliances in the Anthropocene: Fire, Plants and People by Christine Eriksen and Susan Ballard is an important and accessible conduit into thinking about human (mal)adaptation to bushfire.” (David Bowman, natureecoevocommunity.nature.com, June 3, 2021)
‘How should humans live in the Anthropocene? In this beautiful book, Christine Eriksen and Susan Ballard help us answer the question. It can and should be a life attuned to the many alliances we enter into with all manner of non-human agencies, even those that can at times be threatening. The authors’ gripping stories about fire, plants and people in Australia have global relevance. They demonstrate the folly of thinking we can or should seek to domesticate and control the forces of life on our remarkable planet.’ (Professor Noel Castree, University of Manchester, UK)Authors and Affiliations
About the authors
Dr Christine Eriksen is Senior Lecturer in the School of Geography and Sustainable Communities at the University of Wollongong, Australia. Her interests bring together social and cultural geography with natural hazards and disasters. She is author of Gender and Wildfire: Landscapes of Uncertainty.
Dr Susan Ballard is Senior Lecturer in the School of the Arts, English and Media at the University of Wollongong, Australia. She works at the intersection of art history and the environmental humanities. She is the co-author of 100 Atmospheres: scale and wonder in the Anthropocene.
Dr Susan Ballard is Senior Lecturer in the School of the Arts, English and Media at the University of Wollongong, Australia. She works at the intersection of art history and the environmental humanities. She is the co-author of 100 Atmospheres: scale and wonder in the Anthropocene.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Alliances in the Anthropocene
Book Subtitle: Fire, Plants, and People
Authors: Christine Eriksen, Susan Ballard
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2533-9
Publisher: Palgrave Pivot Singapore
eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 978-981-15-2532-2Published: 01 March 2020
Softcover ISBN: 978-981-15-2535-3Published: 01 March 2021
eBook ISBN: 978-981-15-2533-9Published: 29 February 2020
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XVII, 136
Number of Illustrations: 38 illustrations in colour
Topics: Human Geography, Environmental Sociology