This chapter outlines a historiography of the papacy and the environment and begins with several observations. First, papal approaches to the environment are shaped by the historical evolution of the papacy itself. Second, notions of environment and environmentalism are varied across secular, religious, and, by extension, papal discourse and action. Relatedly, these pluriform conceptions are influenced by locations that include geographic, epistemological, and socio-cultural. Thus informed, the chapter engages two distinct periods. The first is the sixth to the sixteenth centuries, wherein papal approaches to the environment were variously shaped by notions of wilderness, classical natural history, anthropocentrism, monastic spiritualities and activities, and expanding ecclesial infrastructure and temporal power. The second period begins with global industrialization around 1750 and continues through to today. Therein, papal environmentalism is especially expressed in modern Catholic social teaching that began with Leo XIII in 1891 and continues through Francis I, especially Laudato si’ in 2015.

This chapter examines the role of national and regional institutions in promoting integrated regulation and administration of biodiversity and forest management in the Middle East and North African (MENA) region. Drawing lessons from Morocco, it evaluates current legal and institutional challenges in the integrated management of forest and biodiversity. This chapter examines four fundamental themes raised by the legal and judicial protection of the forests. First, it examines the need for integrated regulation of biodiversity and forest management, given the interconnectedness of these two elements. Second, it evaluates integration gaps and challenges in laws relating to forest management and biodiversity in Morocco. Third, it evaluates institutional arrangements in forest management in Morocco, especially the role of the Water and Forestry Agency in activating integrated management of forest and biodiversity in Morocco. Fourth, it offers recommendations on how to advance integrated management of forest and biodiversity in Morocco and across the Maghreb region.

Columella wrote his Res rustica (c. AD 60/1–5) in the wake of a well-developed Roman tradition of agricultural writing. His approach to the ars distinguishes him from Republican predecessors such as Cato and Varro, however, and reflects the scientific culture of the artes of the early Empire. Columella presents agriculture as an august discipline requiring broad, interdisciplinary knowledge and theoretical understanding of nature. Depreciatory views of agriculture, imputed to other Romans, are explained as resulting from moral decline that has led to ignorance of correct technique. Columella’s discussions of manuring (Book II) and vine propagation (Book III) are shaped by his scientific conception of ars, as he argues that close appreciation of the principles of plant life provides the foundation for good agronomy. Columella’s treatise is not only the preeminent work of agronomy from Greco-Roman antiquity but also witness to the vibrant scientific culture of the artes.

Australia’s botanical diversity has shaped its literature of the environment. Through a selection of novels, short stories, and poetry, this overview focuses on the literary depiction of native species such as the coolabah, paperbark, and wattle. Structured chronologically, the discussion begins with Indigenous Australian narratives of plants, arguably the world’s oldest literary representations of botanical life. In the narratives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, plants are wellsprings of material and spiritual sustenance. Between British settlement and Federation, non-Indigenous narratives of Australian flora begin to appear. In these decades, literature negotiates the strangeness of antipodean plants in comparison to familiar European species. In post-Federation literature, the relationship between flora and nation becomes more pronounced. During this period, writers increasingly foreground the clearance of forests in the post-colonial state. Contemporary literature reveals an expanded understanding of plant ecologies and conservation realities. The work of Judith Wright and Oodgeroo Noonuccal during these years establishes a precedent for later literary activism. The Anthropocene literature of recent decades confronts humanity’s escalating impacts on plants especially in Australian regions. Literary works critique climate disturbance, habitat degradation, urban development, and related exigencies that continue to imperil the future of plants in Australia.

This chapter argues that what Gerard Manley Hopkins termed the “rural scene” provided a focal point in the 1870s for profound changes in the Victorian understanding, valuation, and transformation of the natural world. British writing at this time demonstrates a shift from viewing the rural scene as picturesque landscape, as evidenced in provincial novels such as George Eliot’s Middlemarch, to conceiving of it as an environment encompassing human and nonhuman nature, notably in Richard Jefferies’ nature writings and Thomas Hardy’s first Wessex novels. Grasping the full scope of Victorian responses to the rural scene in the 1870s also requires looking to the expanding pastoral industries of the settler empire. Writing in and about the settler colonies of Australia and New Zealand, by Lady Barker, Rolf Boldrewood, and Anthony Trollope, highlights how a perceived absence of rural aesthetic values helped render colonial nature available for transformation and subsequent economic exploitation.

This chapter engages with social sciences theories about ‘institutions’. It illuminates not only the resilience but also the intensification of overland caravan trade thanks to an efficient organised system involving traders, Bedouin and Ottoman officials. The chapter tries to rely as much as possible on the viewpoint of caravan traders. It offers insights on historiographical debates about the changing roles of state institutions in the Late Ottoman Empire, the State’s legitimisation and its echoes among urban and nonurban caravan practitioners, and the economic and political competition by political entities that are built on the monopolisation of trading routes. The aim is to introduce a new panorama of the political economy of the Middle East that does not focus on the coastal and urban societies but on the hinterlands and steppes and considers theses spaces as elements of a region, that is, the intermediary space connecting the local and the world, on the one hand and connecting cultural affiliation with economic exchange on the other.

The conclusion sums up the main arguments of the book on the formative albeit discreet role of caravan trade in the political economy of the Middle East both during and after the Ottoman period. It draws on this history to challenge recent directions in the history of the Middle East by advocating for inner perspectives on connections thanks to the crossing of endogenous documentation (in Arabic and in Ottoman) with foreign sources, more attention for legacy, resilience and slowness in a period of rapid technological and political transformation. The history of caravan supports a new way of considering the Middle East from inside. It also offers insights on the background of debates over past carbonisation and present decarbonisation.

This chapter introduces the Caucasus as a geographic entity and its placement relative to the Greater and the Lesser Caucasus mountain ranges. It discusses the impact of the region’s terrain on human settlement and community isolation; the tectonic-geophysical formation of the Caucasus Mountains; the diverse physical environments of the Caucasus region; the region as a frontier zone and biogeographic barrier; early hominoid presence in the Caucasus; the history of glaciation and the possibility for population refugia throughout the Last Glacial Maximum, and the Manych-Kerch Spillway.

Hopkins developed an ecological poetics informed by evolutionary theory, energy physics, and Catholic theology, bearing witness to local devastations of an unsustainable Victorian global economy. His sensitivity to such degradation was heightened by exposure to a range of polluted regions and by the effort to convey poetically his embodied perception of environmental features and patterns. His poems present everything from flashing bird wings, to waves, to wheat fields as dynamically interrelated through the flow of energy, and therefore vulnerable to its squandering by human industry. Such waste is both ecologically and spiritually self-destructive for Hopkins, given that Christ is incarnate in every fibre and force of the material world. His later sonnet ‘Ribblesdale’ manifests these concerns by lamenting a river valley poisoned and denuded by globally destructive industry and industrialized agriculture, even as it affirms vulnerable, accountable membership in a wounded terrestrial body that is divinely indwelt.

This chapter adopts an Anthropocene framework to contextualize Gerard Manley Hopkins. Placing his work within the epoch of human geophysical agency, I argue, affords new perspective on his radical contribution as an ecological witness. It allows us to see that Hopkins’s depictions of natural entities involved an intuition about their embeddedness in larger systems, many inchoately explained by contemporary science; that his representations of non-human nature seldom avoided the ‘anthropos’ (the ‘human’ in Anthropocene), whether as destructive interloper or divinely privileged steward; and that his life and work included moments of prescience about human activity interfering with Earth-system processes. To recontextualize Hopkins thus is to furnish different ways to interpret his work (in wider conceptual networks and deeper time horizons) and to animate that work’s reception (in light of present concerns). It is also to affiliate Hopkins with ecopoets whose formal innovations might be fruitfully juxtaposed with his poetics.

The Introduction defines the book’s major concepts, such as belonging with, elucidates its major keywords – movement, listening, radiance, resuscitating, restoring, and recycling, and explains its foundational ideas and methodology. These intertwine feminist, historical, ecological, and subject–object analyses to underpin how diminishing women and objects is a related activity. Second, it establishes how texts heal injurious mergings between women and matter and jettison the supposed “female virtues” – dissimulation and passivity – in order to embrace actual ethical beliefs and independence, reconnect women’s corporeality, reason, spirit, sexuality, and virtue, rendering these cooperating, rather than sparring, bodies. Third, it argues that these materialist ethics reveal how consumption can be constructive, a finding that disputes mainstream concerns that women were merely thoughtless consumers. Finally, it illuminates how the political and personal need to incarnate ideals by rendering concrete such abstractions as the “rights of man” entwines with gender debates and subject–object explorations during the revolutionary years.

Chapter 5 argues that in Burney’s Evelina and The Wanderer hats become a kinesthetic means for women’s metamorphosis and for asserting rights laws do not ensure when characters employ them to hide their faces and thereby establish some security from aggressive male intrusion and threatening social expectations, a use which reveals consumption’s positive aspects by linking fashion and necessity. This chapter explores how, in both novels, hats positively facilitate nonrecognition by shrouding or changing the face, allowing women to assert the right to privacy: the liberty they experience allows for self-recognition. Smith’s Desmond, in contrast, offers instances in which characters fail to recognize and to belong with the human and nonhuman, while their very lapse inspires other characters’ (and readers’) recognition of how vital that communion is, especially regarding ecological preservation. One of this chapter’s largest concerns addresses the relationship between characters’ ability to pay attention to things and their potential capacity to secure justice for themselves.