Reading List

Stacy Alaimo
Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self

“How do we understand the agency and significance of material forces and their interface with human bodies? What does it mean to be human in these times, with bodies that are inextricably interconnected with our physical world? Bodily Natures considers these questions by grappling with powerful and pervasive material forces and their increasingly harmful effects on the human body. Drawing on feminist theory, environmental studies, and the sciences, Stacy Alaimo focuses on trans-corporeality, or movement across bodies and nature, which has profoundly altered our sense of self. By looking at a broad range of creative and philosophical writings, Alaimo illuminates how science, politics, and culture collide, while considering the closeness of the human body to the environment.”

Ursula Biemann and Paulo Tavares
Forest Law: On The Cosmopolitics Of Amazonia

“This book navigates across a frontier landscape—the living forests of western Amazonia.  Situated at the transition between the Amazon floodplains and the Andean mountains, this border zone is one of the most biodiverse regions on Earth and fulfills vital functions in global climate regulation. It is also the home of indigenous nations and a land of great ethno-cultural diversity. Underlying this vast territory are immense deposits of oil, gas, and minerals, most of which remain untapped to this day. Recent years have seen the expansion of large-scale extraction activities in western Amazonia, driven by escalating competition between states and multinational corporations over the control of these strategic natural resources.”

Abby Cunnane and Amy Howden-Chapman
The Distance Plan

“The Distance Plan is a project founded by Abby Cunnane and Amy Howden-Chapman that brings together artists, writers and designers to promote discussion of climate change within the arts. The Distance Plan works through exhibitions, public forums and the Distance Plan Press which produces publications, including an annual journal.  The Distance Plan is also a catalogue of existing projects which engage in related theoretical pursuits. As its first point of departure, The Distance Plan re-presents works that successfully engage in the practice of thinking across vastness, bringing together work and writing that deals with the challenge of thinking across vast space and vast time. Continuing the planning process acknowledges that talk can become solid, that visualisation can become protocol. Anchoring the thread of action must begin in this moment. The Distance Plan is a collection of tools, timelines and knowledge beginning now, strung through distance, coalescing into a plan.”

Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin
Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies

Taking as its premise that the proposed geologic epoch of the Anthropocene is necessarily an aesthetic event, this book explores the relationship between contemporary art and knowledge production in an era of ecological crisis, with contributions from artists, curators, theorists and activists.

T.J. Demos
Art After Nature

T.J. Demos
Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology

“While ecology has received little systematic attention within art history, its visibility and significance has grown in relation to the threats of climate change and environmental destruction. By engaging artists’ widespread aesthetic and political engagement with environmental conditions and processes around the globe—and looking at cutting-edge theoretical, political, and cultural developments in the Global South and North—Decolonizing Nature offers a significant, original contribution to the intersecting fields of art history, ecology, visual culture, geography, and environmental politics. Art historian T. J. Demos, author of Return to the Postcolony: Specters of Colonialism in Contemporary Art (2013), considers the creative proposals of artists and activists for ways of life that bring together ecological sustainability, climate justice, and radical democracy, at a time when such creative proposals are urgently needed.”

Jedediah Purdy
After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene

“Nature no longer exists apart from humanity. Henceforth, the world we will inhabit is the one we have made. Geologists have called this new planetary epoch the Anthropocene, the Age of Humans. The geological strata we are now creating record industrial emissions, industrial-scale crop pollens, and the disappearance of species driven to extinction. Climate change is planetary engineering without design. These facts of the Anthropocene are scientific, but its shape and meaning are questions for politics—a politics that does not yet exist. After Nature develops a politics for this post-natural world.”