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\"Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics considers the way artists, filmmakers, and activists use polar art to illustrate our current environmental crises as well as to reimagine our world and the ways we engage with it. Examining a wide range of contemporary art, photography, and film, Lisa E. Bloom shows how these works demonstrate the ways that our planetary crises are linked to climate change as well as a long history of colonialism and capitalism. Bloom insists on linking racial, sexual, and gendered discriminatory violence to wider environmental destruction, and she engages feminist, Black, indigenous, and non-western perspectives to address the exigencies of what we are experiencing now as the Anthropocene, or the new geological period characterized by ecosystem failures, rising sea levels, and climate-led migrations\"-- Provided by publisher.

The development of the environmental movement has relied heavily upon written and visual imagery. Representing the Environment offers an introductory guide to representations of the environment found in the media, literature, art and everyday life encounters. Featuring case studies from Europe, the Americas and Australia, Representing the Environment provides practical guidance on how to study environmental representations from a cultural and historic perspective, and places the reader in the role of active interpreter. The book argues that studying representations provides an important lens on the development of environmental attitudes, values and decision-making. John R. Gold is Professor of Urban Geography and George Revill is Senior Lecturer in Geography at Oxford Brookes University. 'An accessible, well-balanced and historically informed look at how societies portray and understand the natural environment.' - Richard Ek, Lund University, Sweden 'The strength of this text is the approachable way in which it has been written and the book provides a superb introduction for anyone wanting to better understand how the environment is being represented, by whom and for what purpose.' - Mags Adams, University of Salford, UK 1. Introduction 2. Studying Environmental Representations 3. Representations in Context 4. The Classical, Medieval and Renaissance Legacies 5. Enlightenment and Romanticism 6. Empire, Exploitation and Control 7. Representing Urban Environments 8. Historic Cities, Future Cities 9. Conclusion

Shortlisted, 2020 ASAP Book Prize How do literature and other cultural forms shape how we imagine the planet, for better or worse? In this rich, original, and long awaited book, Jennifer Wenzel tackles the formal innovations, rhetorical appeals, and sociological imbrications of world literature that might help us confront unevenly distributed environmental crises, including global warming. The Disposition of Nature argues that assumptions about what nature is are at stake in conflicts over how it is inhabited or used . Both environmental discourse and world literature scholarship tend to confuse parts and wholes. Working with writing and film from Africa, South Asia, and beyond, Wenzel takes a contrapuntal approach to sites and subjects dispersed across space and time. Reading for the planet, Wenzel shows, means reading from near to there: across experiential divides, between specific sites, at more than one scale. Impressive in its disciplinary breadth, Wenzel’s book fuses insights from political ecology, geography, anthropology, history, and law, while drawing on active debates between postcolonial theory and world literature, as well as scholarship on the Anthropocene and the material turn. In doing so, the book shows the importance of the literary to environmental thought and practice, elaborating how a supple understanding of cultural imagination and narrative logics can foster more robust accounts of global inequality and energize movements for justice and livable futures.

The former Soviet empire spanned eleven time zones and contained half the world's forests; vast deposits of oil, gas and coal; various ores; major rivers such as the Volga, Don and Angara; and extensive biodiversity. These resources and animals, as well as the people who lived in the former Soviet Union - Slavs, Armenians, Georgians, Azeris, Kazakhs and Tajiks, indigenous Nenets and Chukchi - were threatened by environmental degradation and extensive pollution. This environmental history of the former Soviet Union explores the impact that state economic development programs had on the environment. The authors consider the impact of Bolshevik ideology on the establishment of an extensive system of nature preserves, the effect of Stalinist practices of industrialization and collectivization on nature, and the rise of public involvement under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, and changes to policies and practices with the rise of Gorbachev and the break-up of the USSR.

The contributors ask the following questions: • What are the different rhetorical strategies employed by writers, artists, filmmakers, and activists to react to the degradation of life and climate change? • How are urban movements using environmental issues to resist corporate privatization of the commons? • What is the shape of Spanish debates on reproductive rights and biotechnology? • What is the symbolic significance of the bullfighting debate and other human/animal issues in today's political turmoil in Spain? Hispanic Issues Series Nicholas Spadaccini, Editor-in-Chief Hispanic Issues Online hispanicissues.umn.edu/online_main.html

As the seriousness of climate change becomes more and more obvious, military institutions are responding by taking a prominent role in the governing of environmental concerns, engaging in \"climate change war games,\" and preparing for the effects of climate change-from conflicts due to loss of food, water, and energy to the mass migration of millions of people displaced by rising sea levels. This combat-oriented stance stems from a self-destructive pattern of thought that Robert P. Marzec names \"environmentality,\" an attitude that has been affecting human-environmental relations since the seventeenth century. Militarizing the Environmenttraces the rise of this influential mindset in America and other nations that threatens to supplant ideas of sustainability with demands for adaptation. In this extensive historical study of scientific, military, political, and economic formations across five centuries, Marzec reveals how environmentality has been instrumental in the development of today's security society-informing the creation of the military-industrial complex during World War II and the National Security Act that established the CIA during the Cold War. Now embedded in contemporary Western thought, environmentality has even infiltrated scientific thinking-transforming Darwinian insights into a quasi-theology that makes security the biological basis of existence. Marzec exposes the self-destructive nature of this increasingly accepted worldview and offers alternatives that counter the blind alleys of national and global security.

Environmental degradation has profoundly impacted both human society and ecosystems. The environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) illuminates the intricate relationship between economic growth and environmental decline. However, the recent surge in trade protectionism has heightened global economic uncertainties, posing a severe threat to global environmental sustainability. This research aims to investigate the intricate pathways through which trade protection, assessed by available trade openness data, influences the nexus between economic growth and environmental degradation. Leveraging comprehensive global panel data spanning 147 countries from 1995 to 2018, this study meticulously examines the non-linear dynamics among trade, economy, and the environment, with a particular emphasis on validating the EKC hypothesis. This study encompasses exhaustive global and panel data regressions categorized across four income groups. The research substantiates the validity of the EKC hypothesis within the confines of this investigation. As income levels rise, the impact of economic growth on environmental degradation initially intensifies before displaying a diminishing trend. Additionally, trade protection manifests as a detriment to improving global environmental quality. The ramifications of trade protectionism display nuanced variations across income strata. In high-income nations, trade protection appears to contribute to mitigating environmental degradation. Conversely, within other income brackets, the stimulating effect of trade protection on environmental pressure is more conspicuous. In other words, trade protectionism exacerbates environmental degradation, particularly affecting lower-income countries, aligning with the concept of pollution havens. The study’s results illuminate nuanced thresholds in the relationship between trade, economic growth, and environmental degradation across income groups, emphasizing the heterogeneous impact and underlying mechanisms. These findings provide valuable insights for policymakers, urging collaborative efforts among nations to achieve a harmonious balance between economic advancement and environmental preservation on a global scale.

In the past decades, the environmental presence and ecological risks of chlorinated paraffins (CPs), an emerging class of organic halogen compounds, have been receiving increasing attention worldwide. Short-chain CPs (SCCPs) and medium-chain CPs (MCCPs) constitute the important CPs of considerable concern. In this review article, the state-of-the-art research status on the environmental transformation of CPs, including thermal decomposition, photolytic and photocatalytic degradation, biological metabolism, and atmospheric transformation, was summarized and integrated in detail. The degradation efficiency and transformation products of CPs in these environmental processes were evaluated, in which dechlorination was considered as the major reaction pathway. Notably, waste incineration of CPs has been demonstrated to generate a variety of persistent chlorinated aromatic hydrocarbons such as polychlorinated biphenyls and polychlorinated naphthalenes, which have more significant environmental impacts. Additionally, photodegradation and photocatalysis are suggested as the feasible techniques for efficient removal of SCCPs from water matrices. Overall, the current transformation studies of CPs could facilitate the comprehensive understanding of their environmental behaviors and fate as well as the development of promising remediation strategies for pollution control.

Background A number of computational tools for metabolism prediction have been developed over the last 20 years to predict the structures of small molecules undergoing biological transformation or environmental degradation. These tools were largely developed to facilitate absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion, and toxicity (ADMET) studies, although there is now a growing interest in using such tools to facilitate metabolomics and exposomics studies. However, their use and widespread adoption is still hampered by several factors, including their limited scope, breath of coverage, availability, and performance. Results To address these limitations, we have developed BioTransformer, a freely available software package for accurate, rapid, and comprehensive in silico metabolism prediction and compound identification. BioTransformer combines a machine learning approach with a knowledge-based approach to predict small molecule metabolism in human tissues (e.g. liver tissue), the human gut as well as the environment (soil and water microbiota), via its metabolism prediction tool. A comprehensive evaluation of BioTransformer showed that it was able to outperform two state-of-the-art commercially available tools (Meteor Nexus and ADMET Predictor), with precision and recall values up to 7 times better than those obtained for Meteor Nexus or ADMET Predictor on the same sets of pharmaceuticals, pesticides, phytochemicals or endobiotics under similar or identical constraints. Furthermore BioTransformer was able to reproduce 100% of the transformations and metabolites predicted by the EAWAG pathway prediction system. Using mass spectrometry data obtained from a rat experimental study with epicatechin supplementation, BioTransformer was also able to correctly identify 39 previously reported epicatechin metabolites via its metabolism identification tool, and suggest 28 potential metabolites, 17 of which matched nine monoisotopic masses for which no evidence of a previous report could be found. Conclusion BioTransformer can be used as an open access command-line tool, or a software library. It is freely available at https://bitbucket.org/djoumbou/biotransformerjar/ . Moreover, it is also freely available as an open access RESTful application at www.biotransformer.ca , which allows users to manually or programmatically submit queries, and retrieve metabolism predictions or compound identification data.

Nowadays, the current synthesis techniques used in industrial production of nanoparticles have been generally regarded as nonenvironmentally friendly. Consequently, the biosynthesis approach has been proposed as an alternative to reduce the usage of hazardous chemical compounds and harsh reaction conditions in the production of nanoparticles. In this work, pure, iron (Fe)-doped and silver (Ag)-doped zinc oxide (ZnO) nanoparticles were successfully synthesized through the green route using Clitoria ternatea Linn. The optical, chemical, and physical properties of the biosynthesized ZnO nanoparticles were then analyzed by X-ray diffraction (XRD), field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM), energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX), UV–Vis diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (DRS), zeta potential measurement, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), and surface analysis. The biosynthesized ZnO nanoparticles were crystallized with a hexagonal wurtzite structure and possessed smaller particle sizes than those of commercially or chemically produced samples. The existence of biomolecules to act as reducing and stabilizing agents from C. ternatea Linn aqueous extract was confirmed using FTIR analysis. The biosynthesized ZnO nanoparticles mainly comprised of negatively charged groups and responsible for moderately stable dispersion of the nanoparticles. All these properties were favorable for the sonocatalytic degradation of Congo red. Sonocatalytic activity of ZnO nanoparticles was studied through the degradation of 10 mg/L Congo red using ultrasonic irradiation at 45 kHz and 80 W. The results showed that the sonocatalytic degradation efficiency of Congo red in the presence of biosynthesized ZnO nanoparticles prepared at 50 °C for 1 h could achieve 88.76% after 1 h. The sonocatalytic degradation efficiency of Congo red in the presence of Ag-doped ZnO was accelerated to 94.42% after 10 min which might be related to the smallest band gap energy (3.02 eV) and the highest specific surface area (10.31 m 2 /g) as well as pore volume (0.0781 cm 3 /g). Lastly, the biosynthesized ZnO nanoparticles especially Ag-doped ZnO offered significant antibacterial potential against Escherichia coli which indicated its ability to inhibit the normal growth and replication of bacterial cells. These results affirmed that the biosynthesized ZnO nanoparticles could be used as an alternative to the current chemical compounds and showed a superior sonocatalytic activity toward degradation of Congo red.