Melancholic Man and the Encrypted Earth: Mourning Terminable and Interminable

In The Threshold of the Visible World (1996), Kaja Silverman advances a subtle, ethical, post-Lacanian account of what constitutes “the active gift of love” and how this might be expressed on the screen. She argues for an orientation of subject to love object which is not merely an alternative to romantic passion, but an account of how identification of the loving subject and love object “might function in a way that results in neither the triumph of self-sameness, nor craven submission to an exteriorised but essentialized ideal” (p. 79). In a move particularly relevant to our focus in this paper, she goes on to suggest that a gift of love so constituted entails an escape from conformity with culturally dictated ideals and thence a capacity “to put ourselves in a positive identificatory relation to bodies which we have been taught to abhor and repudiate” (Ibid.). Two lesbian/gay teen films of the late 1990s—Lukas Moodysson’s Fucking Amal (1998; also known as Show Me Love) and Simon Shore’s Get Real (1999)—offer an illuminating contrast in the ways they deal with the possibility of the gift of love in the conflictual contexts of teenage gay and lesbian love and sexuality and of small-town spaces. Space solicits desire, but the sexual frisson that is evoked through encounters in various spaces depicted as offering excitement, risk, and bodily pleasures seems limited in three ways. First, the progression from desire to love is severely circumscribed by cultural presuppositions about the physical and social attributes of appropriate love objects. This is particularly evident in the Hollywood teen film, with its recurrent male and female Cinderella roles. Second, the desire represented is predominantly heterosexual, so the appropriate love object is further specified by the assumption of heteronormativity. Finally, there is a persistent attribution of space to woman and time to man—as early as the late eighteenth century William Blake had written, “Space is a woman” (in Bal, 1988, p.169)—and although this has been questioned by feminist thinkers (see Irigaray 1987) it still pervades filmic imagery. As Sue Best (1995, pp.182-3) notes, the bounded spaces that people inhabit—“the nation, regions, cities and the home”—often rely on feminine metaphor to describe their attributes, contours, architecture; in the case of the romantic ‘home’, its enclosures suggest a warm, uterine space and maternal care. In a related sense, the open spaces of the countryside, the city streets and solitary travel have connoted a masculine space and prerogative. Traditionally, man moves through these spaces with a sense of temporal purpose, while woman bides her time in bounded domestic space. In Fucking Amal, the film’s preoccupation with enclosed spaces, and especially the domestic spaces of home and school, on the one hand generates an intense mood of claustrophobia and on the other communicates the terrifying aloneness of the young person abjected by the “in”-crowd. A measure of the inanity of the teenage boys of this small Swedish community is the unexamined misogyny of their spatial thinking, as when, for example, Jessica’s boyfriend Markus asserts that boys are interested in and understand technology, like cell phones, and that girls are instead good at things like

Special Report: Highlights of the 2004 Institute on Psychiatric Services

This book addresses the ways in which the Black Summer megafires influenced the development of climate narratives throughout 2020. It analyses the global pandemic, and its ensuing restrictions, as a countervailing force in the production of such narratives. Lives and properties were lost in the spring and summer of 2019 and 2020, when catastrophic bushfires burnt through millions of hectares of mainland Australia. Nearly 3 billion native animals died. And for millions of Australians, and others worldwide, it was through the Australian megafires that the global climate emergency became tangible and concrete, no longer a comfortably deferred, albeit problematic abstraction which could be consigned to future generations to deal with. This book explores the legal and other implications of new understandings of climate emergency arising from the fires, and the emergence of a hierarchy of emergencies as the pandemic came to dominate global and domestic political discourses. It examines narratives of culpability, and legal avenues for seeking retribution from government and big fossil fuel emitters. It also considers the impact of the fires on the burgeoning phenomenon of climate activism, particularly in Australia, and the ways in which pandemic restrictions curtailed such activism. Finally, the book reflects on the fires through the lenses offered by climate fiction, and apocalyptic fiction more generally, in order to consider how these shape, and might shape, our responses to them. This important and timely book will appeal to environmental lawyers and socio-legal theorists; as well as other scholars and activists with interests in climate change and its impact. It is recommended for anyone concerned about current and future climate disasters, and the shortcomings in legal, political and popular responses to the climate crisis.

THE EXTENT AND NATURE of Africa s crises and the inadequacies and impact of current policy responses only emphasize that the search for alternative approaches and solutions to the continent's development problems must be intensified. Perhaps current alternative development strategies in subSaharan Africa can be criticized as having failed on two related fronts. First, the cultural resource base of indigenous peoples has not been adequately assessed for the contributions it can make to the continent's development. 1 Secondly, it appears little attention has been paid to the few success cases at the micro-level of some of Africa's rural communities.2 What is needed are more in-depth examinations of the micro-level specificities of the development problems facing rural peoples to serve as a guide to finding alternative national development strategies. Gender and socioeconomic differentiations among households with regard to rural adaptive strategies or responses to problems, as well as the differences among rural communities in different micro-environments ought to be noted. Local strategies of coping with economic and socio-environmental hardships involve social, economic, ecological and political responses that have long been defined, motivated and controlled by indigenous populations themselves. Longitudinal studies of these coping strategies, particularly, as they emerge and re-emerge in contemporary situations indicate a great deal of dynamism and innovativeness on the part of local peoples. They also reveal how some local populations are resisting state encroachment and are striving for local autonomy over the control and use of resources at their disposal.

]We are living in a time of massive anthropogenic ecological and climatic shifts. Awareness of these changes and their effects on human lives is increasing, with recognised impacts on mental health. At present, a variety of different terms exist to describe ecological change-related distress. They range from the philosophical to the clinical, and are already beginning to form part of professional practice, as well as popular discourse, with prescriptive implications. In this piece, I explore some of the different names and frames for ecological distress by drawing on a sample of 30 online articles, blogs, and videos, and bringing these into dialogue with scholarly literature. My purpose is to open up a conversation about how medical anthropologists might attend to the meaning-making processes that surround ecological distress and (individual, institutional, and political) responses to it.

Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Climate Change: Impacts & Responses, 7-8 April 2022. The conference featured research addressing the following special focus: “Responding to Climate Change as Emergency: Governing the Climate Emergency” and annual themes: The Nature of Evidence: Why the persistent challenge of universalizing evidence based approaches?; Assessing Impacts in Diverse Ecosystems: What are the impacts of climate change on natural environments in particular and universal views; Human Impacts and Responsibility: How have we been agents of climate change, what does a politics of responsibility reveal?; Technical, Political, and Social Responses: How do scientists, technologies, policy makers, and community members respond to climate change?

Proceedings of the Sixteenth International Conference on Climate Change: Impacts & Responses, hosted by the Éklore-Ed School Of Management, Pau, France, 25-26 April 2024. The conference featured research addressing the following special focus: “Responding to a Climate Emergency: Purpose Driven Organizations for a Sustainable Future” and annual themes: Theme 1: The Nature of Evidence Theme 2: Assessing Impacts in Diverse Ecosystems Theme 3: Human Impacts and Responsibility Theme 4: Technical, Political, and Social Responses

Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Conference on the Arts in Society, hosted by the UBC Robson Square, Vancouver, Canada, 20-21 April 2023. The conference featured research addressing the following special focus: “Responding to the Climate Emergency: Scalable Solutions for the Climate- Nature Intersect” and annual themes: • Theme 1: The Nature of Evidence • Theme 2: Assessing Impacts in Diverse Ecosystems Themes • Theme 3: Human Impacts and Responsibility Theme • Theme 4: Technical, Political, and Social Response.

The article discusses two novels of the end of the Soviet era (The Scaffold, 1987, by Ch. Aitmatov and Overburdened with Evil , 1988, by A. and B. Strugatsky), in which different models of human history are built by the introduction of the gospel story into the controversy of modern life. Various causes for the crisis of modern civilization are put forward: the fall from ontology (Aitmatov) and the rejection of a reasonable construction of the cosmos (Strugatsky). The common point of writers of different anthropological concepts is seen in the belief in the existentialist personality: Aitmatov sees it as the need for personal awareness of the ontological basics of existence; the Strugatskies - as the need to form a non-utopian consciousness in the homo sapiens, ethical criteria to improve the inert matter. The difference in the interpretation of the Evangelical plot is revealed. In Aitmatov's novel, the non-diegetic narrator, who has access to the consciousness of Jesus, identifies ideological conflicts – the dispute with Pilate and inner contradictions in the justification of his sacrificing Jesus. In the Strugatskies' novel, the Evangelical events are given in the story of a trifling character (Judas), and their interpretation by other characters places emphasis on the doom of the Teacher's sacrifice due the level of consciousness of people who are not ready to accept the ethical ideas of Jesus. The author concludes that there is a difference between the authors' concepts of human history, expressed in comparing the Evangelical time and Modernity: Aitmatov recognizes the tragic futility of the Savior's sacrifice, and еру Strugatskies prove the inevitable overburden of evil in attempts to improve people's consciousness and the world order.

Title: Green bonds in the world-ecology: capital, nature and power in the financialized expansion of the forestry industry in Brazil

The available choices of political responses to disruption in the global climatic system depend in part on how the problem is conceptualized. Researchers and policymakers often invoke a “climate crisis” or “climate emergency,” but such language fits poorly with current knowledge of the problem's physical causes and social impacts. This article argues that climate change is instead more like a political epic. It involves neither sudden onset, as in the concept of emergency, nor decisive resolution, as in the concept of crisis, but rather a protracted ordeal of (temporally) obscure origins and uncertain outcomes. This alternative ontology of climate change highlights its novel temporal properties, including unusually slow-moving or time-lagged causal dynamics, with unsettling implications for academic research on the climatic-institutional nexus. Normatively, it undermines arguments for democracies’ environmental superiority over autocracies that rely on the former's general superiority at resolving crises and responding to emergencies. At the same time, some new arguments for democratic distributions of power become possible within the epic frame. More broadly, embracing the assumption of epic climate change may redirect attention from Promethean, managerial, or technocratic solutions to questions about which values or identities deserve preservation amid presumptively interminable and imperfectly remediable sources of disorder.

During Covid lockdown in 2021, I was invited to offer a masterclass to masters students at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh: ‘In the leadership module we have a masterclass, groupwork, study time and a plenary that ties together. We even have a book club!!! The aim is to be generic, not nursing/health focused. The learners make space to consider application in their own areas/specialisms. ‘We were wondering if you would like to/could do a masterclass within the strand of healthfulness. We really value your storytelling and know you are really passionate about healthfulness from an ecological perspective. We would love it if you could draw on your experiences of politics, environment... The more creative the better. ‘We would want learners to consider their role in creating healthful cultures and ways that they might go about it.’ How could I resist, given my decades-long passion for transformational practice development and inquiry within a critical creativity landscape in health and social care? In my retirement, I have continued to work successfully in this way in a variety of contexts, including political activism. I responded: ‘I would love to show how healthful cultures can be created, with stories from my person-centred community engagement work in creating a neighbourhood plan [for 21st century local housing development] and campaigning for positive personal and community political responses to the climate and ecological emergency. Stories that show up something of how conditions can be created to enable the ecology of human flourishing to be embodied in action. Also, how I am seeing the stirrings of transformative change in local politics that have previously been very traditional in the way they work with people.’ This article is based on that webinar, because students not only enjoyed it, but we heard that some were also able to transfer the learning to their different professional contexts. Therefore, for this paper, I repurposed and elaborated the material for a wider audience. Health and social care services are increasingly offered in new ways in the community and I imagine more health and social care professionals will be setting up innovative ways of working. I hope, therefore, that sharing my experience of creating cultures where everyone flourishes by doing things differently, as well as critically and creatively with the whole self, will be helpful. I will share four stories of how I do that in a variety of contexts and show you, through images and metaphors, how I have gone about that, first in health and social care but primarily for now in political and campaigning contexts. Through the stories, I will show you what it takes as a person to create healthful cultures. Woven through the article is an introduction to critical creativity and its three mandalas. They are there for you to look at with soft eyes/letting the words wash over you – without digging into meaning at this point. My hope is that you begin to get a sense of where the mandalas fit into the stories and, if you so choose, into your own stories and practice. The parts of the mandalas are italicised in the text as they are mentioned.

Cold chain logistics are crucial for reducing agricultural product loss, yet the environmental impact of energy and packaging consumption, among others, demands attention, making the search for eco-friendly development modes essential. Based on data from 30 provinces in China from 2015 to 2021, this study analyzes the basic correlation between the development of cold chain logistics of fresh agricultural products (CCLFAP) and the ecological environment (EE) by using a random forest regression model in comparison with the XGBoost model. Correlation heatmaps were used to analyze the relationships between the cold chain logistics of fresh agricultural products and various factors of the ecological environment. The generalized additive model was then used to establish the connection between cold chain logistics and the ecological environment, identifying significant factors impacting EE. The results demonstrate that a higher development level of cold chain logistics corresponds to a better development trend of EE. The economic efficiency and technical aspects of cold chain logistics for fresh agricultural products are closely related to ecological pressures and responses. The number of employees in the logistics industry, the trading volume of fresh agricultural products, the number of refrigerated vehicles, and the capacity of the cold room have significant positive correlations with the ecological environment, while the per capita consumption of fresh agricultural products, the number of cold chain logistics patent applications, and the road density had significant negative correlations with the ecological environment. The effects of the number of cold chain logistics enterprises and the freight turnover of agricultural products transported by the cold chain on the ecological environment fluctuated. These findings contribute to reducing climate and environmental emergencies throughout the life cycle, offering sustainable development solutions for the fresh agricultural product cold chain logistics industry.