For the twentieth-century naturalist and poet Loren Eiseley, the relationship between human beings and the natural world has become unnatural, divided by the era of modern technology. Loren Eiseley’s Writing across the Nature and Culture Divide analyses how the philosopher of science becomes a boundary crosser in time and space. Qianqian Cheng points to Eiseley’s method of uniting science and the humanities to reflect on human evolution and the past and future role of science with a visionary and poetic imagination. Seizing the connectedness of living beings, Eiseley, and now Cheng, makes us aware of the presence of nature even in daily urban life. Qianqian Cheng unveils Eiseley’s merits, showing the poet as a necessary voice in the urgent mission to make individuals realize their responsibility to respond ethically to the living world.

The Age of Capitalism, Consumer Culture, and the Collapse of Nature in the Anthropocene argues that the stability of post-industrial, postmodern society is threatened by the convergence of three distinct, yet interrelated, crises: environmental degradation, capitalist economic development, and the primacy of consumption and self-absorption as the basis for economic development at the expense of community and social relationships. Jack Thornburg contrasts advanced modern society with indigenous cultures in terms of nature and conceptions of the communal self. The complex nature of capitalist-oriented society has influenced how individuals conceptualize themselves. The outcome, the author contends, is a competitive society in which individuals are alienated living in uncertain times. One consequence of these crises (all of which derive from the Enlightenment and the concomitant appearance and evolution of capitalism) has been the destruction of a worldview balancing and connecting well-being with prosperity of the natural world. Money and materialism cannot buy happiness as capitalist narrative asserts. Thornburg claims that the happiness sought by individuals seeking meaning through consumption can only be realized by reintegrating nature with the human spirit.

As the global climate crisis and biodiversity loss deepen their impact and gain pace, Making Nature Social: Towards a Relationship with Nature provides core insights into what it means to understand our relationship to nature. This relationship is illustrated through interviews with people working in different nature practices, including engaging with nature, non-human animals, place, advocacy, and with work organization values. Rembrandt Zegers argues that since non-humans do not use human language, meaning is conducted through the senses, giving rise to a knowing that manifests itself through the body first before finding its way socially in human language. Through these senses the relation to non-human others and nature can become a conversation; in other words, a relationship built on reciprocity. The book illustrates how these meanings occur and how these conversations happen, how crucial they are, and how they are connected. It dives deep into the essence of the lived experience of our relationship to nature and in doing so acknowledges how important the lived experience is for the purpose of a relationship with nature.

Sustainable Energy Development: Technology and Investment provides deeper insights into the connected realms of sustainable energy, economic growth, and political discourse, emphasizing the pivotal role of innovation, investment, and technology. This edited collection delves into the burgeoning intersection of capitalism and environmentalism, examining initiatives such as climate-conscious investment and the development of green technology. Climate change poses threats to human well-being, including complex ecosystems, global food security, and the pursuit of sustainable pathways. Historical temperature records serve as compelling evidence of climate change, illustrating global temperature increases across various countries and territories. The book offers profound insights into sustainable energy development, technology, and investment in climate-oriented solutions, elucidating both the opportunities and challenges of climate-aligned investment strategies.

This volume analyses Bangladesh’s human-nature/environment relationships in terms of development victimhood, environmental injustices, and resistance of the marginalized. It demonstrates how the popular GDP-based economic growth model helps governments undertake “development” projects, threatening the environment and livelihood of the poor while benefiting the affluent. It represents the extant environmentalism in the literary works in Bangla, and tales of pollution, depletion; and human-nature/environment symbiosis that shows ways to resist victimhood. Against current environmental challenges and other environmental issues, this volume presents the epitome of how politics, biodiversity, and technology meet in many cross-cutting pathways.

Everyday Life Ecologies: Sustainability, Crisis, Resistance is about those complex, sticky, but also open arrangements of bodies, objects, and plants that make up daily existence. The multiple and interlocking lines of a long capitalist crisis disrupt their normal flow: sometimes, they open opportunities for transformation, sometimes else, they foreclose horizons of change. In contrast with approaches that respond to environmental crisis by advocating “sustainable lifestyles” and “responsible behaviors,” Alice Dal Gobbo suggests that it is necessary to address the complex socio-material relationalities that constitute everyday ecologies. Beyond that, the book argues for their politicization, illuminating daily existence as embedded in capitalist relations of re/production. Combining political ecology and new materialist sensitivities, this book investigates the ways in which ecologically damaging logics are inscribed in everyday assemblages through their habitual rehearsal and libidinal hold. But it also points to how apparently banal acts of resistance embody and promote different logics, such as a logic of care and an ecological “aesth-ethics” of desire. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Northeast of Italy, this journey through the concrete matters and beings of daily life in crisis talks beyond this emplaced reality and dialogues with emerging forms of contestation and prefiguration that put socio-ecological reproduction at their center.