Volume 40, Number 1, 2024

EN:

This article delineates the idea of an Indigenous hydropoetics as an ancestral outlook on rivers grounded in Aboriginal cultural traditions of, and everyday interactions with, rivers. In particular, two features—embodiment and relationality—prove integral to conceptualising Indigenous hydropoetics in response to the hydrological precarities of the present. Recognising rivers' capacity for agency, the idea is developed in relation to contemporary Aboriginal Australian poetry narrating long-standing human interdependencies with rivers. The hydropoetic verse of Jack Davis, Samuel Wagan Watson, and Jeanine Leane reveals embodied relations to—and relational epistemologies of—rivers and their habitats through a focus on Derbal Yerrigan (the Swan River) of Western Australia, Marrambidya Bila (the Murrumbidgee River) of New South Wales, and Maiwar (the Brisbane River) of Queensland, respectively. Their writing integrates Dreaming narratives and elicits river poiesis, while also confronting aquatic conservation urgencies in Australia. Evoking sacred rivers whose origins lie in the Dreaming, their work also presents a medium for reverent listening to the fluvial world. While Leane’s hydropoetics centres on the mediating role of memory—hers and the river’s—Watson’s poetry calls attention to fractured river ecologies in Brisbane's urban environment. For Davis, bodily relationality between humans, plants, and rivers presents a potent means of ecopolitical resistance through multispecies solidarity. Immersed in Aboriginal creation narratives, an Indigenous hydropoetics foregrounds the multidimensional intersections between humans, rivers, and all life, thus energising new imaginings of rivers and encouraging receptivity to their biocultural complexities.

EN:

At first glance, Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night seems like a far cry from what Matthew M. Lambert has termed “Green Depression” literature. Philip Rahv’s critique that Tender attempted to hide from a hurricane under a beach umbrella tagged it with the lingering perception that it was incongruously out of touch with its era’s “climate.” Revisiting Tender through the lens of Antonioni’s 1960 film L’avventura that showcases a copy of Fitzgerald’s novel, this article looks back on the novel itself to reveal the powerful undertow of its “ecological latencies,” which were there all along in submerged and “dormant” form. The creation of this lens through which to view Tender Is the Night does not mean that this article aims to offer a comparative reading of Antonioni’s film and Fitzgerald’s novel. Side-by-side formal comparison is not the goal of this article. Rather, the article underscores a carefully staged yet critically overlooked reference in Antonioni’s 1960s film itself—to Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night—in order to offer a completely new reading, an ecologically engaged one, of Fitzgerald’s 1934 novel.

EN:

Scientific consensus on the environmental emergency has prompted recognition that business as usual is not only materially catastrophic but ethically, socially, and politically unfair. Working from different axiological perspectives, scholars in the environmental humanities have framed the crisis as an opportunity for paradigmatic and radical change, encouraging a new “Great Transformation” or “Great Transition”. Such appeals tend to focus on systemic change at economic and political levels. Nevertheless, the ecological crises as a revolutionary opportunity demands an integral metamorphosis of Western capitalist cultures, including the ontological and ethical dimensions embedded in perception, desires, and affects, and grounded in elementary subjective practices. In this light, ecospirituality is integral to transformative ecology. Confronted with the ecological crisis, this calls for us to set to work on the widely discussed issue of the relations between spirituality and politics.

EN:

This four-year explorative study is located in a nearby forest, or more accurately a clearcut, in the western part of Sweden. The objective is to contribute to existing knowledge about forest gardening by exploring a forest milieu without trees in the Northern Hemisphere where the conditions are poor. The aim is to support biodiversity in the short term and to find out whether we could cultivate root vegetables, potatoes, and summer flowers in this nutrient-poor and shadowless environment. The study has an eco-philosophical approach that promotes eco-pedagogy and environmental education and a pragmatic pedagogical approach that adopts a "learning-by-doing" belief. The exploration is underpinned by collaborative autoethnography, and the research is conducted in and through practice. The findings show that a planting project in a clearcut requires a lot of preparation and planning and that it is possible to use a clearcut to grow potatoes, peas, and some summer flowers without special efforts, but hard to grow other crops such as vegetables and root vegetables. The project implies that the planting activities in a clearcut may have a deep impact on people’s sense of human-nature identity and respect for the natural environment.

EN:

What does the War on Terror have to teach us about the ongoing War on Invasive Species? Rooted in the author's personal experiences as an immigrant on a family farm in Virginia, this essay explores themes of language, mental frames, and violent conflict in novel ways that shed insight into the morality of the struggle to manage unwanted species.

EN:

Louise Dunlap's book "Inherited Silence: Listening to the Land, Healing the Colonizer Mind" is a heartfelt exploration of the historical harm caused by colonization, with a focus on Dunlap's Californian roots. Through a blend of personal experiences and broader themes such as climate change, resource wars, and genocide, Dunlap offers insight into the trauma caused by colonization and suggests self-healing strategies for descendants. The book is split into ten chapters, each of which explores a different aspect of the issue.