Wild Spaces Research Articles

The Classical Debt: Greek Antiquity in an Era of Austerity by Johanna Hanink

204 PHOENIX with the image of the mountain itself. As Williams argues at the beginning of Chapter Six, Etna’s role may be compared with the status of the lighthouse in Virginia Woolf’s novel (221–222). Even as it looms over the entirety of the work, the symbol varies in its meaning for different characters. For Pietro, the volcano is violent, sublime, and poetic, “a self-projection” (223) that strengthens his identification with wild spaces outside the Venetian cursus. Pietro’s Etna contrasts sharply both with the more rationalist profile of the volcano of Bembo père and with the tidy, ordered space of Bernardo’s villa. This reading of Pietro’s volcanic self-fashioning is persuasive. Hence it comes as a slight surprise, when, in the final sentence of the chapter, Williams asks: “does he not in a sense violate the Etnean topography by injecting his own dream into what is, simply, there?” (268). The query seems to back away from the book’s otherwise robust recognition of the plasticity of Etna’s topography, and of how Pietro’s self-projection imposes itself, not on some opaque, pre-representational terrain that is simply “there,” but on the dense matrix of prior representations Williams has hitherto deftly unpacked. The complaint is a minor one, however, given that the book’s study of Pietro’s “fusing of philology and topography” (264) and the framing of both within the broader Venetian spatial turn are so rich and compelling. Similar praise is due to the closing discussion of collecting practices (Chapter Seven), as exemplified by the memory-legacy of the Bembo collection and Pietro’s residence at Padua, which, as Williams suggests, might be seen as an architectural portrait of its owner (272). The Bembo collection can be read as a visual corollary for the De Aetna’s storehouse of textual memories and naturalist knowledge, its implicit self-portraiture, the antiquarian travel it represents, and the aesthetic refinement of its typeface. In a broader perspective, Williams considers both collecting practices and (post-)classical literary texts in terms of the increased possibilities for print dissemination and the expanding horizons of travel and communication in early modernity (292). Williams’s monograph encompasses spatiality, the materiality of books, and interactions between the textual and the visual within a holistic vision that is at once scrupulously rigorous on the level of scholarly detail and audacious in scope of inquiry. Instances of individual argumentation are meticulously laid out with diplomatic transparency in a chiselled prose whose stylistic qualities cohere nicely with the elegant Bembo font appropriately selected for the book’s publication. Williams’s study offers a striking example of what can be done by classicists in the field of Renaissance studies, where philological training and familiarity with sub-fields such as codicology, combined with an up-to-date critical vocabulary and conceptual framing, hold strong potential for powerful new insights . Pietro Bembo on Etna: The Ascent of a Venetian Humanist makes an indispensable contribution to our understanding of Venetian humanism, while paving the way for future explorations of Renaissance literature at the intersection of classical antiquity, print technology, and transformations in spatiality and visual culture. Memorial University Luke Roman The Classical Debt: Greek Antiquity in an Era of Austerity. Par Johanna Hanink. Cambridge, Mass. et Londres : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2017. Pp. 337. L'ouvrage de Johanna Hanink pose la question de la dette collective de l’Occident à la Grèce ancienne. En retraçant 2500 ans d’évolution, l’auteure s’interroge sur l’impact BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 205 qu’eut la Grèce sur la constitution des idéaux démocratiques, philosophiques ou artistiques au sein de nos sociétés européennes ou nord-américaines. D’entrée de jeu, The Classical Debt met en évidence la place de choix de l’imagerie issue de l’Antiquité dans nos modes de représentation occidentaux. Le scandale et l’effroi causés par les destructions d’antiquités par le groupe armé État Islamique, la polémique sur une éventuelle rétrocession des frises du Parthénon par le Royaume-Uni, le souvenir d...

Wild Spaces, Open Seasons: Hunting and Fishing in American Art ed. by Kevin Sharp

Wild Spaces, Open Seasons: Hunting and Fishing in American Art ed. by Kevin Sharp

Losing Eden: An Environmental History of the American West by Sara Dant

Reviewed by: Losing Eden: An Environmental History of the American West by Sara Dant James E. Sherow Sara Dant, Losing Eden: An Environmental History of the American West. Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons, 2016. 221 pp. Paper, $29.95. Sara Dant has produced a work well overdue for all students of the American West. There hasn't been a survey of the American West written in several years. For over twenty years, my students have read Richard White's It's Your Misfortune (1991). I hoped that at some point an enterprising scholar would write a more compact, updated thematic treatment of the West. Dant has provided just what the doctor ordered. And more than its value for classroom use, Dant's work is also fit for a general readership. With laser-like focus, Dant hones in on three major themes. First is the tension between capitalistic exploitation of natural resources and the drive toward ecological sustainability. Second, she employs Garrett Hardin's "tragedy of the commons" to explain where and when people have overexploited the West's natural resources [End Page 255] and how public land policies in the West often acted as a brake on resource overuse in a land of limited resources. Her third theme is how people have attempted to create a sustainable, livable environment in the West. Dant's work is not some polemic predicting gloom and doom for the West's inhabitants. She makes it clear that as humans, "we care about what we know" (5). In ten succinct chapters she gives an overview of this region from the last ice age to the present. Her West begins west of the one hundredth meridian, and, as John Wesley Powell, Walter Prescott Webb, and Donald Worster before her, she recognizes this region as distinct in its aridity. Within this realm, she traces the rise and fall of cultures that overextended themselves as they confronted the limitations imposed by aridity. Whether the Chacoans prior to the arrival of Europeans, the overhunting of bison by both Indians and European Americans, massive deforestation, the collapse of open range cattle grazing, or overfishing salmon in the Columbian River, the evidence of overexploitation of natural resources is indisputable. Dant also covers both the conservation and preservation movements. There is the expected treatment of Gifford Pinchot's utilitarian policies and John Muir's work to preserve wild spaces. Yet she also details how these movements could intertwine, especially in Senator Frank Church's decades of work to pass environmental legislation. She is also not afraid to address the backlash against environmental legislation of the 1960s and 1970s by highlighting the "wise use movement" and its various manifestations, beginning in the Reagan era and continuing into the present with the exploits of the Bundy family. Dant offers a thought-provoking, well-written work. My American West students thoroughly enjoyed reading Dant as they engaged the issues she raised. Moreover, they began reflecting on their own roles in shaping this place called the West. Now knowing more about the West, they started thinking about what they should do. In this, Dant fully achieved her aim. [End Page 256] James E. Sherow Kansas State University Copyright © 2018 Western Literature Association

Cotorsion and wild homology

The classical concept of cotorsion of an abelian group is here characterized in the style of algebraic compactness, namely by the existence of solutions of certain systems of equations. This approach further highlights the close relation between the two concepts. Then the natural extension to nonabelian groups is related to a topological property and used to determine the first singular homology group of wild spaces. As a further application, it is shown that the abelianization of the quotient ⊛ i G i /(* i G i ) is isomorphic to Π i Z/⊕ i Z, for arbitrary nontrivial groups G i of cardinality at most the continuum.

What said the way? (Qué dice el camino?) Broadening the concept of education through experiences in opposing ontologies while walking to Santiago

This paper asks the question, is the state of being experienced on the Camino de Santiago de Compostela – «Camino-being» – related to or in some ways compatible with an Indigenous/Autochthonous state of being? At first glance, the two states might appear to share a connection through their focus on the natural environment: the relatively wild spaces of certain arcs of the Camino would certainly seem to link this kind of journey with the ecologically-oriented state of being of Indigeneity/Authochthony. Connection with the natural world is a significant aspect of the pilgrimage for many on the Camino, who perceive that without this spiritual progress could not have occurred. This study uses a hermeneutic approach to investigate these ideas as encountered in pilgrimage on the Camino. The central question also leads to some related, and more directly educational ones: Despite the apparent or actual relatedness, does the circumstance of being in wild places influence the learning that occurs therein, and how might a consideration around such learning influence educational practice ?

Accommodating Children’s Activities in the Shared Spaces of High Density and Master Planned Developments

When we consider the impact of the built environment on children and whether facilities meet their needs, we are usually examining public open space – public parks, streets, wild spaces, outdoor malls. Public open space is essential for children in cities for two clear reasons: the space is open, allowing activities and a sense of freedom that the smaller, indoor spaces which abound in cities prohibit, and it is public, meaning that at least theoretically, it is accessible by all, regardless of age, class, or wealth. It is easy to assume that open space in cities is by definition public, but that is not necessarily the case. The great public parks of Europe typically began life as private royal hunting grounds; London’s squares were almost all built as private gardens accessible only by adjoining land-owners (Summerson 1978), and this model was replicated overseas in developments like Gramercy Park in New York. However, the growth of civil, democratic society from the 17th century onwards forced the aristocracy to share their open urban spaces with the public and provided incentives for the construction of new public open space. Central Park in New York was audacious not just in its scale and form, but in its commitment to provide recreational space to the diverse masses of the city (Miller 2003). In London, during World War II, the iron railings of private squares were removed to be used for ammunition, causing George Orwell to celebrate that “the squares lay open, and their sacred turf was trodden by the feet of working-class children, a sight to make dividend-drawers [ground landlords] gnash their false teeth” (Orwell 1944, pp.175-6). In the post-War period, many railings were not replaced, leaving the squares permanently accessible to the public. In Australia, strong government commitment to freehold housing meant that private open space was always rare, and during the 20th century, suburb after suburb was developed with parks, playing fields and bushland, in public ownership and accessible by all.

Introduction: Invasive Ecologies

Introduction:Invasive Ecologies Rafi Youatt (bio) during a recent collective research effort at the us-mexico border in Texas, some members of the group went to see a section of the border fence at a place called the Hidalgo Pumphouse. The Pumphouse itself is now a museum about early agriculture in Texas. The site is also visited because it is a World Birding Center, home to hundreds of species of migrating birds. Thousands of people come to watch the bird migrations that pass through each year. While we were there to interview a local activist about the border fence, we also were part of a disturbing moment in which two individuals, who had managed to climb over the border fence from the Mexican side to the American side and were hiding in the tall grass, were pointed out to US Border Patrol by some of the birdwatchers. Within minutes, the full force of the Border Patrol descended, and the two individuals were pulled up, handcuffed, put in a van with tinted windows, and taken away. Not far from the Pumphouse, a century-old, tick-eradication quarantine line runs for hundreds of miles, roughly parallel to the border. Staffed by dozens of US government-funded horse-mounted cowboys, the purpose of the quarantine line is to keep tick-borne cattle fever out of the United States, largely by keeping stray cattle from Mexico from wandering north. The region also has a thriving population of wild Nilgai antelope. Along with the native white-tailed deer, Nilgai are sometimes a vector for the cattle-fever-carrying ticks, particularly when they cross the Rio Grande into Mexico and come back into the United States. Nilgai were brought to the region in the 1930s from India, and have since flourished in the wild spaces of dry Texan [End Page 167] landscapes. Unlike the white-tailed deer with whom they compete for rangeland, the Nilgai must face an open-hunting season. Increasingly, there are also government efforts to control their movements through the quarantine line, in an effort to ensure that the damaging cattle-fever disease does not affect local livestock populations. I am wondering, still, how to think about the stark but swirling differences in that space, and about the ostensible invasiveness of migrants who, perhaps, were not from that far away; the abiding hospitality for migratory birds in protected natural spaces that also make border patrolling easier; the "invasive" label as attached to a species (Nilgai) that in no plausible way invaded local ecologies but was introduced and encouraged; and the many ways that invasiveness attaches to both human and nonhuman life. The three papers gathered here highlight for me some of the ways that we might want to think about the politics of invasiveness, and the practices both beyond the human and in intersection with various figurations of it. One way we might think about invasiveness is in relation to a series of oppositions. Some of those oppositions can be politically generative in troubling ways, in particular in the opposition of invasiveness to nativeness and purity. This sense is frequently invoked, especially when invasiveness is discussed in an ecological setting, partly in debt to ecology's own language and history of thinking in terms of invasive species and native species, and with an eye to the troubling ways that this has sometimes been read from or back onto political projects of nativeness and purity. But each of the authors, in their contributions here and elsewhere, also raise other oppositions, or antonyms, of "invade" that open a wider range of possibilities: to aid or assist; to help or protect; or to leave alone. Eleana Kim does this through an engagement with cosmopolitanism and hospitality; Hugh Raffles does so by starting with native plants and nativist politics but also via a "thoughtful and inclusive response" to invasive species in a basic condition of cosmopolitan impurity; and Fabio Parasecoli does it by considering ways to affiliate with small-scale bacteria, to create "pluralities, interdependence, [End Page 168] and innovation." These other oppositions to "invasive" raise a powerful series of alternative ways we might start to understand invasiveness. This leads to a second general point about invasiveness...

Wilderness Immersion Tuning: Education with Evolution and Neuroscience in Mind

These combined two papers make the case that certain kinds of learning in relatively less human-directed environments, which we call wilderness immersion tuning, not only make good evolutionary and neuroscience sense, but are needed for the optimal growth and learning of young people. The paper is presented in two parts. Part One makes a neuroscience-based case for learning in certain ways in wild spaces. It considers the philosophical idea of humans as embodied learners. It provides a connection between recent neuroscience discoveries and empirical studies highlighting the effectiveness of learning in nature. Part Two extends these neuroscience discoveries and particularly explores psycho-social maturation through learning in less human-controlled places. It calls for learning in wild places for early adolescent students. While the two parts are separated in order to meet editorial guidelines, they are necessarily intertwined and ought to be read as parts of a whole.

The bees in your backyard: a guide to North America's bees

The Bees in Your Backyard provides an engaging introduction to the roughly 4,000 different bee species found in the United States and Canada, dispelling common myths about bees while offering essential tips for telling them apart in the field.The book features more than 900 stunning color photos of the bees living all around us—in our gardens and parks, along nature trails, and in the wild spaces between. It describes their natural history, including where they live, how they gather food, their role as pollinators, and even how to attract them to your own backyard. Ideal for amateur naturalists and experts alike, it gives detailed accounts of every bee family and genus in North America, describing key identification features, distributions, diets, nesting habits, and more.Provides the most comprehensive and accessible guide to all bees in the United States and CanadaFeatures more than 900 full-color photosOffers helpful identification tips and pointers for studying beesIncludes a full chapter on how to attract bees to your backyard

“Left All Alone in This World’s Wilderness”: Queer Ecology, Desert Spaces, and Unmaking the Nation in Frank Norris’s McTeague

“Left All Alone in This World’s Wilderness”Queer Ecology, Desert Spaces, and Unmaking the Nation in Frank Norris’s McTeague Jada Ach (bio) Nearly everywhere on earth, sand is principally made up of one element—in some places silica, in others limestone. Ninety percent of a grain is almost always just one of those two elements. But the other 10 percent is the percentage with a difference—the percentage that, in its difference, matters—the percentage that can tell us something about the history of a place. —Vanessa Agard-Jones Can you describe that vast and holy desert, a desert that is so old that it once was the sea? No, you can’t. But does that stop you? Never. —Michael Cobb But you have not known what force resides in the mindless things until you have known a desert wind. —Mary Austin “There was no change in the character of the desert,” observes the narrator near the end of Frank Norris’s McTeague. “Always the same measureless leagues of white-hot alkali stretched away toward the horizon on every hand” (236). Just a few sentences later, the narrator describes the “horrible desolation” of Death Valley, where “not a rock, not a stone” interrupts “the monotony of the ground” (236). In almost every paragraph in McTeague’s final chapters, the narrator notes the desert’s refusal to cultivate life and deliver topographical diversity, and at times Norris seems to go out of his way to emphasize the stasis of this region: “on the face of the desert not a grain of sand was in motion” (232). Not a one. However, Norris’s [End Page 175] desert may be more complicated—and more erotic—than what appears “on the face.” Despite its harshness, its relentless invariability, Norris also depicts the desert as uneven, “dazzling,” and shimmering with the “glitter of sand and sky” (236). How is it that the desert can simultaneously contain all these contradictory characteristics? In one passage, we are told that the landscape is both “flat” and marked by “low mounds”; in yet another passage, the “dazzling surface” of the desert instantaneously fades into oblivion (236). An indeterminate landscape that occupies both eastern California and southwestern Nevada, Norris’s Death Valley is a generative “something—something or other,” to use McTeague’s recurrent utterance, that cannot be reduced to binary systems of classification (226). It is this mesmerizing “something” of the American West that simultaneously propels and frustrates McTeague, just as it did countless individuals who “looked westward for the fulfillment of American promises” in the second half of the nineteenth century (Packard 1). But unlike cowboys, outlaws, miners, prospectors, artists, writers, and others who wandered these regions before him, McTeague looks eastward from the western edge of the nation in hopes of finding his sandy wilderness. However, McTeague’s unpredictable Death Valley is a different kind of wilderness than what John P. O’Grady playfully refers to as the “holiday side of the wild” depicted by other nineteenth-century writers such as Henry David Thoreau and John Muir. In Pilgrims to the Wild, O’Grady uses words including “recreational,” “privileged,” and even “dilettantish” to describe environmental writing born from the nineteenth century’s burgeoning conservation movement, a movement that aimed to preserve the nation’s wilderness areas for future use (125). In such writing, “wilderness” is synonymous not with desert lands, but with the “forested, well-watered landscapes” of New England, coastal California, and the American Northwest (125). Rooted in anxieties “leveled at cities…, urbanization, industrialization, and environmental contamination (not to mention immigration),” Theodore Roosevelt’s wilderness ethos defined the wild spaces of the American West as “elite and remote” corrective zones where Anglo-Saxon men could seek refuge from modern urban influences (Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson 13, 14). Urban anxieties, when combined with the perceived threat of an increasingly feminine [End Page 176] national identity, culminated in what Denise Cruz has called “the hypermasculine discourse of westward-moving imperialism” (488). This growing interest in the (gendered) West contributed to the federal management of wilderness spaces under the designation of national parks, beginning with Yellowstone in 1872. According to Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson, editors...

Virginia D. Nazarea, Robert E. Rhoades, and Jenna E. Andrews-Swan (eds.): Seeds of resistance, seeds of hope: place and agency in the conservation of biodiversity

Inserting itself into the diffuse and highly contentious debate concerning the most effective means of global biodiversity conservation, this book provides a fuller view of how conservation is practiced, providing ample evidence of success. It proves timely in offering a multitude of perspectives on the issues facing preservationists, climbing down from the ivory tower of academia and getting its hands dirty to dig into the places where biodiversity conservation flourishes. As a compilation of case studies from around the US and the world, it demonstrates the irrepressibility of human will in recovering and replenishing ‘lost’ varieties of culturally revered plants. Through ‘‘authoring and anchoring place’’ (p. 13), this work argues that intimate ties to the land through historical legacy and especially through memory ground everyday conservationists and motivate them to produce and reproduce the cultural and historical narratives of native, heirloom food crops. Food embeds itself in individual and collective memories and through the cultivation of these foods, the people who preserve them also (re)member and cultivate identity. From Vietnamese immigrants in Chapter 12 and Cuban exiles in the US (Chapter 11), to indigenous farmers in the Americas (Chapters 4, 5, and 7), Black Colombian coastal groups (Chapter 6) and Cherokee tribes of the American South (Chapter 3), the quotidian actions of peoples marginalized from the mainstream constitute a profound political act of resistance. Completing the milieu of conservation perspectives, this work also offers a chapter (9) on international law that shapes biodiversity conservation globally and to some extent galvanizes resistance. But, resistance to what exactly? Reflecting the complexity of biodiversity and conservation approaches outlined across the chapters, the response to this question is not given explicitly. The book’s editors are careful not to give a concrete or inflexible definition of resistance, instead choosing to provide a general idea of how resistance is lived and the typical conditions that catalyze resistance. Through the chapters we are to understand the forces of globalization, agricultural industrialization, and botanical homogenization as the greatest threats to biodiversity in food crops as described by the contributing authors. The leviathan that is the capitalist system of provision imperils the specific varieties that have cropped up under the care of their human stewards, deeply influenced by the idiosyncrasies of distinct places. The title of this work begs another important question. How are place and agency implicated in biodiversity conservation? To this question the book provides a resounding answer that where biodiversity exists is indispensable to how it can be preserved. That is to say, conservation is not a predetermined set of prescriptions, but rather must take into consideration the social, ecological, political, economic, and cultural contours found in specific places. Contributing authors take up modes of conservation including ex situ (fortress style conservation in seed banks), in situ (conservation through continual cultivation or preservation of wild spaces), in vivo (living conservation), and trans situ (transplants of immigrants to new homes). Evincing a sense of ‘‘geopiety’’ (p. 245), (in)voluntarily displaced and marginalized people propagate a reterritorialization by planting the foods that they remember from their childhood, from their family, from their homeland. & Ashlee M. Adams ama354@psu.edu

Atomic Properties of the Hawaiian Earring Group for HNN Extensions

In 2011, while investigating fundamental groups of wild spaces, K.Eda [7] showed that the fundamental group of the Hawaiian earring (the Hawaiian earring group, in short) has the property that for any homomorphism h from it to a free product A*B, there exists a natural number N such that is contained in a conjugate subgroup to A or B. In the present article, we prove a corresponding property for certain HNN extensions and amalgamated free products. This allows us to show that some one-relator groups, including Baumslag–Solitar groups, are n-slender.

The Prevention Imperative: International Health and Environmental Governance Responses to Emerging Zoonotic Diseases

AbstractDespite widespread recognition of the threat posed by emerging zoonotic diseases (EZDs) to human and animal health and the economy, the root causes of EZDs are largely ignored by the international community. In particular, the links between wildlife health, human-induced land-use change, and EZDs have not been adequately addressed. Generally, states are not required to evaluate the health impacts of land-use decisions within their territories. Similarly, global efforts to protect wild spaces are rarely identified as a health imperative. Where initiatives have been undertaken, they remain focused largely on detecting and controlling only those wildlife diseases that are known or suspected to be a threat to human and animal health or the economy. A critique of the existing international responses leaves no doubt that a preventative approach must be adopted to address human vulnerability to EZDs.

The Midnight Dress by Karen Foxlee (review)

Reviewed by: The Midnight Dress by Karen Foxlee Karen Coats Foxlee, Karen. The Midnight Dress. Knopf, 2013. 277p. Library ed. ISBN 978-0-375-95645-4 $19.99 Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-375-85645-7 $18.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-449-81821-3 $9.99 R Gr. 9-12. Rose Lovell is growing weary of traveling from town to town with her alcoholic father. When they land in the Paradise, a trailer park in a small beach town in Australia, she decides she might want to stay even if her father moves on. Part of her decision comes as a result of making her first real friend, Pearl; Pearl is a luminous beauty who talks a mile a minute and who is full of plans to find her own father, a Russian with whom her mother had a one-night stand, and move to Paris. She’s taking a romantic detour, however, in a flirtation with an older man who has seen enough of the world for Pearl to find him exotic. Rose, meanwhile, has been persuaded by Pearl to have a dress made for the annual harvest celebration by an eccentric old lady named Edie. Edie requires that Rose help make the dress, and as they design, cut, and sew, Edie shares the stories of her family with Rose, who finds her travel-hardened defenses gradually dissolved under Edie’s care and Pearl’s ebullience. All of this story emerges in the shadow of the disappearance of one of the girls; each chapter starts with either an unfolding description of what happened or an update on the investigation, then shifts to flashbacks of the events that lead up to the night of the festival, keeping the mystery taut but also reminding readers that Rose’s year of hope and transformation did not end well. Rose spends much of her time in the green world of the rain forest and beach that make up the edges of the town; her mental and emotional awakening is conveyed by her growing physical ability to navigate the terrain, which is described with alluring and loving detail. Readers who appreciate layered coming-of-age stories cut short by tragedy and tinged with mystery will enjoy this, especially if they have an affinity for wild spaces. Copyright © 2014 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Greening Early Childhood Education

 2014 Children, Youth and Environments Children, Youth and Environments 24(2), 2014 Introduction to the Special Issue: Greening Early Childhood Education Nancy Rosenow Dimensions Foundation/ Nature Explore Program Patti Bailie University of Maine at Farmington Citation: Rosenow, Nancy and Patti Bailie (2014). “Introduction to the Special Issue: Greening Early Childhood Education.” Children, Youth and Environments 24(2): 1-9. Retrieved [date] from: http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublication?journalCode=chilyoutenvi. It is quite possible for today’s child to grow up without ever having taken a solitary walk beside a stream, or spent the hours we used to foraging for pine cones, leaves, feathers and rocks—treasures more precious than storebought ones. Today it is difficult to tear children away from the virtual world of the mall to introduce them to the real one. —Gary Paul Nabhan and Stephen Trimble, The Geography of Childhood Many children today find it easier to stay indoors and watch television. I worry that children do not know what they are missing. Children cannot love what they do not know. They cannot miss what they have not experienced. —Mary Pipher, The Shelter of Each Other Introduction For most of human existence, children spent a great deal of their childhoods outdoors, connecting with nature on a regular basis as they explored fields, farms or wild areas close to their homes. It was simply a way of being, and this was true for all parts of the world. This way of being is no longer the norm in much of today’s increasingly urbanized, technology-heavy culture, and as a result, children’s unfettered access to the natural world has been shrinking, with alarming results. In the 1990s, we each started focusing on restoring children’s connections with nature, but from two different perspectives: one from environmental education through nature centers in the Midwest, and the other from early childhood and elementary education at the Dimensions Educational Research Foundation. As coeditors of this special issue, we realized we would each bring our different perspectives to this work. The result has been an exciting collaboration as we looked for common understandings and themes we believed would be useful to Introduction to the Special Issue: Greening Early Childhood Education 2 anyone in any part of the world interested in creating opportunities for children to make daily connections with nature. Rationale for This Special Issue For most of human history, discussing the “greening of early childhood education” would have made no sense. Nature was a part of every major philosophical approach to early childhood education. However, in recent years, children’s access to nature has waned due to many factors including children’s increasing use of technology, diminishing wild spaces for children to roam, helicopter parenting, and as an unintended consequence of human progress. It behooves us to find ways to bring back balance to children’s lives through intentional design, through the creation of nature-based programs, and through a recognition of every child’s right to have daily access to the wonders of nature. There is no “one-size-fits-all” way to bring more nature to early childhood programs; context is key. Our combined work extends from nature centers and forest kindergartens to urban settings throughout the United States. Design carries a very different meaning for an early childhood program located within a nature center than it does for a program in an urban setting in the midst of a “food desert.” Add to that the multiple contexts and cultures in various parts of the world, and it becomes even more difficult to talk meaningfully about “the best” ways to green early childhood education. This diversity of approaches is even more evident in the many research papers, field notes and reflections that were submitted for this edition. We began asking ourselves if, within the multiplicity of thinking reflected by various authors, there might be some over-arching themes that would hold true throughout all cultures and contextual settings. We looked first to a document called “Universal Principles for Connecting the World’s Children with Nature,” developed by the Nature Action Collaborative for Children (NACC) Leadership Team, a World Forum Foundation Working Group. The NACC Leadership Team is...

Wild Spaces or Polluted Places: Contentious Policies, Consensus Institutions, and Environmental Performance in Industrialized Democracies

This article contributes to the literature on environmental governance in industrialized democracies by showing that effectively conserving biodiversity requires different institutional strategies than reducing air emissions. Institutional effectiveness diminishes as the politically contentiousness of the issue increases, moving from biodiversity to air pollution, and then climate change. Drawing on Lijphart's theory of consensus democracy and theories of functional and actorcentered federalism, we use the 2010 Environmental Performance Index and panel analysis on twenty-one OECD countries to show that consensus-based party systems improve performance. We find that centralization generates greater improvements with respect to air pollution than biodiversity, but that decentralized strategies can improve biodiversity when implemented alongside corporatist bargaining structures.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Ecocriticism and Eighteenth‐Century English Studies

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Ecocriticism and Eighteenth‐Century English Studies

Prevalence of the Bacterium Coxiella burnetii in Wild Rodents from a Canadian Natural Environment Park

Zoonotic diseases impact both wild and domestic animal populations and can be transmitted to humans through close contact with animal species. Reservoir species acting as vectors are major traffickers of disease. Rodents contribute to the transmission of Coxiella burnetii although little is known about its prevalence in wild animal populations. DNA was extracted from genital swabs collected from woodland jumping mice, deer mice, Southern red-backed voles, Eastern chipmunks, North American red squirrels, as well as Southern and Northern flying squirrels collected from Algonquin Park, Canada. The presence of C. burnetii was determined through real-time PCR. All species sampled had some prevalence of infection, except Eastern chipmunks, indicating wild rodents in Algonquin Park are reservoirs for C. burnetii. Emerging zoonotic diseases are linked to increasing globalization. Contact amongst individuals increases as crowding, habitat loss and fragmentation increase within wild spaces. Parks often act as a last refuge for wildlife but may also be an important transmission zone of wildlife disease to humans. Investigations that attempt to discover wild reservoir species of zoonotic disease are critically important to understanding the risk of pathogen exchange between wild and human populations.

The Role of Veterinarians in the Conservation of Avian Species

The biodiversity crisis is often reported in the news today. As wildernesses become less wild, wildlife species become less present in the remaining wild spaces. Biodiversity is in decline. In fact, the rate of extinctions is currently estimated at 100–1000 times above the pre-human “baseline normal” levels, which has led many to propose that we are in a period of the sixth great extinction. The difference between this sixth extinction period and the previous 5 is that species are going extinct predominantly due to anthropogenic—human driven—impacts. The extinction of species is often related to habitat loss and degradation, wildlife trade, invasive species, and, in a growing number of cases, disease. Today 12% of bird species are threatened with extinction. That is 12%! Veterinarians in private practice (companion, exotic, and poultry), rehabilitation centers, zoological institutions, government agencies, and nongovernment conservation organizations work with avian patients. In this age of increasingly complex threats to the long-term conservation of endangered avian species and media coverage of zoonotic diseases with links to birds (eg, avian influenza, West Nile virus), the roles that veterinarians have in the care for individual patients and flocks, human health, and avian conservation are complex and variable.I have invited 5 health and conservation professionals working in the field of avian health and conservation to discuss some of the hot topics in avian conservation and the role of veterinarians in this field. Participants are Christine V. Fiorello, DVM, PhD, Dipl ACZM, Response Veterinarian, Oiled Wildlife Care Network, Wildlife Health Center, School of Veterinary Medicine, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, USA; J. Jill Heatley, DVM, MS, Dipl ABVP (Avian), Dipl ACZM, Associate Professor, Zoological Medicine, College of Veterinary Medicine, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA; Kathryn P. Huyvaert, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA; Peggy Shashy, DVM, Animal Medical Clinic at Sawgrass, Ponte Vedra Beach, FL, USA; and Kristine M. Smith, DVM, Dipl ACZM, Associate Director, Health and Policy, EcoHealth Alliance, New York, NY, USA. I hope that by hearing their perspectives, each of us may be able to more fully consider our roles to ensure the long term conservation of avian species.

Carrion

Carrion Janice N. Harrington (bio) Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry undermines the misconception that African American poets are not engaged with or inspired by the natural world, do not find cultural as well as personal meaning in nature, are not witnesses against the destruction of natural environments, or do not champion expanding the boundaries of social justice to include access to clean air and water. Black Nature provides proof of the engagement of African American poets through poems concerned with topics as far ranging as urbanization, pollution, the destruction of natural resources, the natural world in the context of African American cultural history, and nature as a medium for aesthetic enrichment. Anthony Walton’s “Carrion” reprinted in Black Nature spotlights the impact of urbanization and the destruction of natural habitats. “Carrion” begins with the image of a mutilated deer. The bodies of dead animals increase mile on mile. Highway numbers and subdivisions mark the roadkills with their abstract names. The losses pile up—wildlife, forests, farmland, and, paradoxically, connections between people. Highways and urbanscapes connect us, but Walton’s poem reveals our separation—urban centers disconnected from the natural world but linked by roads, the “clearcuts” of devastation. In Walton’s poem, roads, suburbs, and urban grids are trimmed with carrion. Nature is reduced to the “smashed meat and bone beyond recognition” at the on ramps of consumerism. The land is, metaphorically at least, “denuded,” a stripped body suffering the violence of human attempts to connect, to eliminate distance, and to conquer time. But the poem’s speaker seems uninvolved. He or she only observes, records the damage, and passes by. A dead raccoon, the poem tells us, “lies blankly.” The raccoon’s body and its death are null sets. But the poem’s description of a destroyed porcupine and the “labyrinthine mess” of its intestines implies the myriad ways the natural world is maimed. Destruction is a labyrinth—a maze where we lose our way. But what of the labyrinth’s monster? Who would that be? The passersby? The comfortable suburbanites? The city dwellers? The real estate developers who name the newest suburb, Beaver Ridge, after an endangered animal? Or the poem’s readers. The poem doesn’t overtly blame anyone, doesn’t overtly make anyone its monster. As Walton’s “Carrion” drives its readers forward it allows no more than a cursory connection to the landscape: highway numbers, the names of subdivisions, and brief views of dead animals. In the same way, Walton shows a modern imagination disconnected from the natural world. When looking at a carcass, the speaker can say only “it is something like a beaver.” Readers never learn what has been killed or who killed it. Nevertheless, Walton reveals that the way we name our suburbs and subdivisions shows a human craving for [End Page 789] nature and natural spaces, a craving that goes un-sated and manifests itself in language, as in the names of suburban towns. The suburbs in “Carrion” are totemic: “Beaver Ridge,” “Fox Hills,” and “Deer Park.” Surrounded by devastation—by nature’s dead and maimed body—we memorialize through naming what we destroy through urbanization. Every road, subdivision, and urban corner is a grave, a tombstone bearing the names of what we’ve lost: Woodland Acres, Apple Valley, Forest Glen. In “Carrion,” fantasy natural spaces replace the real. Isn’t it, Walton shows, the cruelest irony that we name suburbs after the habitat that suburbs destroy? Do we memorialize what we destroy to deny the destruction or to ameliorate the loss? Or is it, as the poem also suggests, that language itself is yet another denuded space? The words we speak, live in, and navigate by are as artificially manicured as any other suburban space. Only the sign for deer and not the deer itself, Walton suggests, can survive. Deer Park but not the deer. We no longer connect with nature and wild spaces through the body’s physical senses—but only through the simulacrum of language. Perhaps, then, a “nature poetry” is only another withered carcass, “something like a beaver,” roadkill, something like the personal-subjective response of romanticism. The romantic poem is always already...