Photography for Earthly Symbiosis

Photography is one of the major ways in which modern urban humans relate to nature and nature is mediated to us. Landscape photography, in particular, is one of the major ways in which modern urban humans relate to the land and the land is mediated to us. I define landscape photography as the creative, photographic inscription of the visual appreciation for the surfaces of the land in the aesthetic modes of the sublime, the picturesque and the beautiful. American and Australian landscape photography has lived under the sign of the sublime and the picturesque for some time. Landscape photography in tourism, conservation and culture has played an important role in forming and maintaining national identity. It has played, and still plays, an important, but undervalued and misunderstood, role that is not aware of the cultural politics of pictures that underpins them. What role it will play in developing environmental sustainability in Australia is another question. Representing the natural environment as an aesthetic object does not promote environmental sustainability

Book Review: Introduction to the Environmental Humanities

Rod Giblett is the author of 30 books of fiction and faction (‘non-fiction’), including recently a book of detective stories, Swamp Deaths: Collected Cold Cases and Other Marshy Mysteries (Europe Books, 2022). Forthcoming in 2023 is Middlemarsh: The Hopkins River, Kindred Wetlands and Remarkable People in Western Victoria, Australia. He is currently writing a book of novel polyphonic parafables entitled Black Waters Live: Or, the Fertile Serpent. He is the founder of wetland cultural studies, psychoanalytic ecology and conservation counter-theology. He is Honorary Associate Professor of Environmental Humanities in the School of Communication and Creative Arts, Deakin University, Australia

Cities and Wetlands

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. From New Orleans to New York, from London to Paris to Venice, many of the world’s great cities were built on wetlands and swamps. Cities and Wetlands is the first book to explore the literary and cultural histories of these cities and their relationships to their environments and buried histories. Developing a ground-breaking new mode of psychoanalytic ecology and surveying a wide range of major cities in North America and Europe, ecocritic and activist Rod Giblett shows how the wetland origins of these cities haunt their later literature and culture and might prompt us to reconsider the relationship between human culture and the environment. Cities covered include: Berlin, Boston, Chicago, Hamburg, London, New Orleans, New York, Paris, St. Petersburg, Toronto, Venice and Washington

Cities and Wetlands

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. From New Orleans to New York, from London to Paris to Venice, many of the world’s great cities were built on wetlands and swamps. Cities and Wetlands is the first book to explore the literary and cultural histories of these cities and their relationships to their environments and buried histories. Developing a ground-breaking new mode of psychoanalytic ecology and surveying a wide range of major cities in North America and Europe, ecocritic and activist Rod Giblett shows how the wetland origins of these cities haunt their later literature and culture and might prompt us to reconsider the relationship between human culture and the environment. Cities covered include: Berlin, Boston, Chicago, Hamburg, London, New Orleans, New York, Paris, St. Petersburg, Toronto, Venice and Washington

Forest Family: Australian Culture, Art, and Trees

'Forest Family' arose initially out of the interest of Rod Giblett in the early pioneering history of his family during the mid-nineteenth century in the south-west forests of Western Australia. The book also arose out of a desire not to write the typical kind of family history that would only appeal to other members of the family. In general, family histories focus exclusively on people, and not on the places and their plants and animals that shaped and affected the family and its history. Such histories tend to ignore or downplay the plants, animals, and places that are agents and players in the family history. These might only have supporting or walk-on roles in the story, and the natural environment might only provide a backdrop against which human action takes place

Introducing Forest Family

'Forest Family' arose initially out of the interest of Rod Giblett in the early pioneering history of his family during the mid-nineteenth century in the south-west forests of Western Australia. The book also arose out of a desire not to write the typical kind of family history that would only appeal to other members of the family. In general, family histories focus exclusively on people, and not on the places and their plants and animals that shaped and affected the family and its history. Such histories tend to ignore or downplay the plants, animals, and places that are agents and players in the family history. These might only have supporting or walk-on roles in the story, and the natural environment might only provide a backdrop against which human action takes place