New Book from Kath Weston: Animate Planet

978-0-8223-6232-6_prGreat looking new title from anthropologist Kath Weston published by Duke (details here). From the website:

Description

In Animate Planet Kath Weston shows how new intimacies between humans, animals, and their surroundings are emerging as people attempt to understand how the high-tech ecologically damaged world they have made is remaking them, one synthetic chemical, radioactive isotope, and megastorm at a time. Visceral sensations, she finds, are vital to this process, which yields a new animism in which humans and “the environment” become thoroughly entangled. In case studies on food, water, energy, and climate from the United States, India, and Japan, Weston approaches the new animism as both a symptom of our times and an analytic with the potential to open paths to new and forgotten ways of living.

Jessica Dempsey on Enterprising Nature: Economics, Markets, and Finance in Global Biodiversity Politics

1118640608A great new book from Jessica Dempsey (UBC Geography). Description below and a short animated video from her website. The publisher’s description does not do the book justice (in my view).

Enterprising Nature explores the rise of economic rationality in global biodiversity law, policy and science. To view Jessica’s animation based on the book’s themes please visit http://www.bioeconomies.org/enterprising-nature/

  • Examines disciplinary apparatuses, ecological-economic methodologies, computer models, business alliances, and regulatory conditions creating the conditions in which nature can be produced as enterprising
  • Relates lively, firsthand accounts of global processes at work drawn from multi-site research in Nairobi, Kenya; London, England; and Nagoya, Japan
  • Assesses the scientific, technical, geopolitical, economic, and ethical challenges found in attempts to ‘enterprise nature’
  • Investigates the implications of this ‘will to enterprise’ for environmental politics and policy

 

Anna Tsing on, The buck, the bull, and the dream of the stag: some unexpected weeds of the Anthropocene