Environmental Consciousness

by Hussey, Stephen; Thompson, Paul

• ISBN13: 9780765808141
• ISBN10: 0765808145
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-06-01
• Publisher: Transaction Pub

Summary

Across the globe, environmental questions feature more and more in todays social and political agendas. In Western countries environmental campaigns target issues at home and abroad. They have a special urgency, which draws in an astonishing range of field campaigners, from young militants to rebel aristocrats. This book examines the roots of contemporary environmental consciousness and action in terms of both popular experience and tradition. It offers a cutting-edge illustration of how narrative and oral history can illuminate our understanding of an uncertain present. The common linking theme is that environmental consciousness and activism are shaped through peoples life stories, and that their memories are shaped not only through individual experience but also through myth, tradition, and collective memory.

Table of Contents

Notes on contributors	vii
Introduction: The Roots of Environmental Consciousness	1	(19)
Popular tradition and personal experience
Stephen Hussey
Paul Thompson
The English, The Trees, The Wild and the Green	20	(35)
Two millennia of mythological metamorphoses
Paul Thompson
Animals, Children and Peasants in Tuscany	55	(8)
A note on the San Gersole archive
Giovanni Contini
Narrating Nature	63	(13)
Perceptions of the environment and attitudes towards it in life stories
Daniela Koleva
When the Water Comes	76	(15)
Memories of survival after the 1953 flood
Selma Leydesdorff
`Our Land is Our Only Wealth'	91	(18)
Changing relationships with the environment
Olivia Bennett
Using Community Memory Against the Onslaught of Development	109	(16)
A case study of successful resettlement in Zapata, Texas
Jaclyn Jeffrey
Signs of Things to Come	125	(14)
Metaphor and environmental consciousness in a Yucatecan community
David W. Forrest
The Environmental Movement in Kazakstan	139	(21)
Ecology, democracy and nationalism
Timothy Edmunds
Paths to Ecofeminist Activism	160	(14)
Life stories from the north-east of England
Niamh Moore
Pathways to the Amazon	174	(26)
British campaigners in the Brazilian rainforest
Andrea Zhouri
REVIEWS	200	(14)
`Not otherwise touchable somehow': ecocriticism and literature	200	(7)
Jeff Wallace
Archetypal history: Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory	207	(7)
Bill Schwarz
Name index	214	(4)
Subject index	218