Religion and ecology: towards a communion of creatures

For better or ill, religion informs the environmental views, values, relations, and behaviour of an overwhelming majority of people around the world, often in profound ways. For this reason alone, studies in religion and ecology should comprise a crucial component of the wider work of the environmental humanities. It is the first task of this essay to show how this has indeed been the case. Among the world’s many diverse religions, Christianity has become a dominant force globally. Christianity remains the most populous world religion, with some 3.2 billion followers, constituting over 31.5% of the global population (Pew Center). While the global predominance of practicing Christians is being challenged by the growth of Islam, estimated at 23.2% of the total population (ibid.) and growing rapidly, Christian traditions remain culturally influential, informing many of the secular attitudes, assumptions and institutions of modern western societies. Moreover, in light of the continuing geopolitical power of the USA, it is not insignificant that 78% of the US population identify as Christian of one kind or another (ibid.). If, as Larry Rasmussen has argued, it would be foolish for those with an interest in the prospects for a more sustainable world “to overlook the religious loyalties of some ten thousand religions and 85 percent of the planets’ peoples” (6), so too it behoves religious studies researchers in the environmental humanities to inquire into the potential for the ‘greening’ of Christianity. In my own case, I should acknowledge upfront that Christianity forms part of my own cultural formation, something that I accept as a problematic inheritance with which I continue to grapple, personally, politically and academically. Accordingly, the latter part of this chapter homes in on Christianity and ecology, with a view to tracing the lineaments of an emergent “communion of all creatures” (Rigby “Animal Calls”)

Of mice and men and aquatic flows: distributed agency in Theodor Storm’s 'Der Schimmelreiter'

Theodor Storm's novella 'Der Schimmelreiter' is set in northwestern Germany, a region with a long history of dyke building and coastal flooding. Drawing on insights into material agency, complexity, and the entwinement of materiality and discourse that have emerged from science studies, I read this text as an exploration of distributed agency that challenges humanist assumptions about both “man” and “nature” by disclosing the limits of rational human mastery in the face of unruly natural phenomena, both “inner” and “outer.” At the same time, the multiple narrative frames of this tragic tale foreground the ineluctable force of viewpoint in any narrative performance of ecocatastrophe. As such, it exemplifies how narrative fiction can provide an imaginative space of reflection to investigate both the complex causality of hybrid natural-cultural disasters and different modalities of human responses to them

Earth’s poesy: Romantic poetics, natural philosophy, and biosemiotics

This chapter undertakes an exploration of the pre-history of contemporary biosemiotics in Romantic ecopoetics, beginning with the ways in which Romantic natural philosophies, such as those of Schelling and Goethe, opened the way for a renewed appreciation of the subjective ‘worlds’ or Umwelten, as Jakob von Uexküll later termed them, along with the agency, communicative capacity, and, in some cases, ethical considerability of more-than-human beings. Secondly, I will examine the implications of this philosophical re-animation of materiality for the reconceptualization of human language, especially as deployed to poetic ends. Here, I turn to Friedrich Schlegel’s (1967 [1800]) “Conversation on Poetry,” in which human 'poiesis', the crafting of ideational worlds by means of words, is repositioned as an emergent property of the prior 'autopoiesis' of natural becoming. Finally, I will indicate how this German proto-biosemiotics finds a literary counterpart in the ecosemiotics of English Romantic literature, focusing on John Clare’s birds’ nest poetry

"Mines aren’t really like that": German Romantic undergrounds revisited

Drawing on contemporary reconceptualizations of materiality as a site of more-than-human mindfulness, meaning, and moral salience, this chapter brings a material ecocritical perspective to bear on the celebration of caverns, mines, and mining in Novalis’s unfinished novel, 'Heinrich von Ofterdingen'. While the German Romantic romance with mining has sometimes been seen as complicit with the emergent extractive economy of industrial modernity, I argue that it is also possible to exhume from Novalis’ literary underground an ecophilosophical ethos of human responsibility for more-than-human flourishing that answers to the socio-ecological exigencies of the present, in which “letting be” is no longer adequate

Lifting the Veil on Obscured Accretion: Active Galactic Nuclei Number Counts and Survey Strategies for Imaging Hard X-Ray Missions

Finding and characterizing the population of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) that produces the X-ray background (XRB) is necessary to connect the history of accretion to observations of galaxy evolution at longer wavelengths. The year 2012 will see the deployment of the first hard X-ray imaging telescope which, through deep extragalactic surveys, will be able to measure the AGN population at the energies where the XRB peaks (~20-30 keV). Here, we present predictions of AGN number counts in three hard X-ray bandpasses: 6-10 keV, 10-30 keV, and 30-60 keV. Separate predictions are presented for the number counts of Compton thick AGNs, the most heavily obscured active galaxies. The number counts are calculated for five different models of the XRB that differ in the assumed hard X-ray luminosity function, the evolution of the Compton thick AGNs, and the underlying AGN spectral model. The majority of the hard X-ray number counts will be Compton thin AGNs, but there is a greater than tenfold increase in the Compton thick number counts from the 6-10 keV to the 10-30 keV band. The Compton thick population shows enough variation that a hard X-ray number counts measurement will constrain the models. The computed number counts are used to consider various survey strategies for the NuSTAR mission, assuming a total exposure time of 6.2 Ms. We find that multiple surveys will allow a measurement of Compton thick evolution. The predictions presented here should be useful for all future imaging hard X-ray missions

Differences in the Experience of Caregiving Between Spouse and Adult Child Caregivers in Dementia With Lewy Bodies.

Background and objectivesDementia caregiving has been associated with increased burden, depression, grief, a decreased sense of well-being and quality of life, and a weakening of social support. Little is known about the experience of caregiving in Dementia with Lewy Bodies (DLB). The present study examines differences in the caregiving experience of spouse versus adult child caregivers of individuals with DLB.Research design and methodsIn this cross-sectional analytic study of spouses (n = 255) and adult children (n = 160) caregivers of individuals with DLB, participants completed an online survey of burden, grief, depression, well-being, quality of life, and social support.ResultsAdult child caregivers were more likely to care for women (p < .001) and see the care recipient less often (p < .001) than spouses. Adult child caregivers reported lower quality of life (p < .001) and more caregiver burden (p < .009), but also greater social support (p < .001) than spouses. Between group analyses of caregiver type by disease severity demonstrated that spousal caregivers experience greater grief with advancing disease (p = .005), while adult child caregivers increase social support with advancing disease (p < .001).Discussion and implicationsSpouses and adult children experience DLB caregiving differently. This was explained by the younger age of the adult child caregiver, frequency of contact with the care recipient, and differences in the care recipient's characteristics, frequency of neuropsychiatric symptoms, and disease severity. DLB caregiver support for this population should target psychoeducation for complicated neuropsychiatric symptoms in the care recipient. Screening all DLB caregivers for burden, grief, and depression is suggested to identify those that may benefit most from intervention. Spouses specifically may benefit from interventions that target increasing social support, while adult child caregivers may benefit from interventions aimed at mitigating burden and improving quality of life

Time Delay Measurements for the Cluster-lensed Sextuple Quasar SDSS J2222+2745

We report first results from an ongoing monitoring campaign to measure time delays between the six images of the quasar SDSS\,J2222$+$2745, gravitationally lensed by a galaxy cluster. The time delay between A and B, the two most highly magnified images, is measured to be $\tau_{\rm AB} = 47.7 \pm 6.0$ days (95\% confidence interval), consistent with previous model predictions for this lens system. The strong intrinsic variability of the quasar also allows us to derive a time delay value of $\tau_{\rm CA} = 722 \pm 24$ days between image C and A, in spite of modest overlap between their light curves in the current data set. Image C, which is predicted to lead all the other lensed quasar images, has undergone a sharp, monotonic flux increase of 60-75\% during 2014. A corresponding brightening is firmly predicted to occur in images A and B during 2016. The amplitude of this rise indicates that time delays involving all six known images in this system, including those of the demagnified central images D-F, will be obtainable from further ground-based monitoring of this system during the next few years.Comment: 9 pages, 9 figures, Version accepted for publication in Ap

The General Digital Forensics Model

The lack of a graphical representation of all of the principles, processes, and phases necessary to carry out an digital forensic investigation is a key inhibitor to effective education in this newly emerging field of study. Many digital forensic models have been suggested for this purpose but they lack explanatory power as they are merely a collection of lists or one-dimensional figures. This paper presents a new multi-dimensional model, the General Digital Forensics Model (GDFM), that shows the relationships and inter-connectedness of the principles and processes needed within the domain of digital forensics. Keywords: process model, computer forensics, expert learning, educational framework, digital forensic