"Green Studies": natura, letteratura e ambiente

The essay illustrates the evolution of eco-criticism toward sustainability studies, while critizing past (and present) anthro-pocentric biases in order to promote greater knowledge about the natural world, and suggesting the inclusion of fields such as enviromental economics. Sustainability studies rely on the concept of complexity -and namely biocomplexity- because it offers an integrated understanding of the natural world as an open, dynamic system subject to nonlinear transformations. As in the past universal literacy was considered a necessary reform to be achieved, now systems literacy is crucial in order to combine the study of social history and cultural discourse with a technical understanding of ecosystem processes. In this regard, the role of literary criticism is central to sustainability studies, as it provides an inherent understanding of human complexity.

This piece seeks to invigorate the way nature has been addressed in American Studies by bringing the work of nineteenth century thinker George Perkins Marsh into the conversation along with some contemporary ideas on the production of nature from Geography. Despite important overlaps between American Studies and Environmental History, and between current work in the field and Environmental Justice Studies, there remains a tendency in American Studies to privilege literary considerations of nature. Encouraging scholars to think through the lingering traces of Romanticism's idealist tendencies, inspired perhaps most centrally by Emerson's remarkable Nature and gauzy readings of Thoreau, the essay hopes to demystify the too easy givenness of nature in many of the treatments it receives in American Studies, and reveal some of the ties between romance and rapacity.

The Federal photography project called DOCUMERICA was created by the Environmental Protection Agency in 1971 to capture images relating to environmental problems, EPA activities, and everyday life. The essay traces the events that led to the creation of the project, and the historical and political context that generated it during the Seventies. It also explores some aspects emerged from the analyses of the pictures: the main argument is that the images reflect the struggles, the nostalgia and the changing aesthetics in the context of the massive social, political, and economic shifts of the 1970s.

In her classic Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldua identifies spirituality as part of the mestizaje of U.S./Mexico border cultures. This essay explores spiritual mestizaje in the writing of Ofelia Zapata, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Ana Castillo, and in the Mission Church of San Xavier del Bac in Arizona. Because spirituality, in border cultures, is also a set of material practices, the local relationships between human and non-human are mixed at the cultural and the ecological levels, creating a matrix of "spiritual ecology" at the border. This study concludes that Anzaldua's theory of spirituality as a normative part of the aesthetics and ontology of mestizaje in the borderlands is correct.

The article investigates the ecological dis­course Silko deploys in The Turquoise Ledge. A combination of nature writing, memoir, and storytelling, the book is an account of the author's complex relationship with the natural environment, which she sees as an integral part of her identity. But, the article contends, the book also narrates the story of how Silko comes to devise a new "ecological ceremony," based on traditional Native American culture, to try to stop the violence against the natural landscape perpetrated by a white char­acter, who exemplifies the typical Anglo American attitude towards the land. By discussing how Silko's Native American vision of the landscape differs from the traditional, hegemonic Western approach, the article argues that an ecological dis­course runs through all her books with a twofold function: it allows Silko to un­dermine and criticise white, hegemonic ideology and, at the same time, it enables her to criticise mainstream literary tradi­tion, but also to claim it as part of her own cultural background.

This essay gives an overview of feminist ecotheologies as they developed within U.S. Christian Churches. It points out their rise in the Seventies within the feminist and ecological movements as well as liberation theologies. Then it ana­lyzes their basic theoretical assumptions, from their original reading of significant Biblical stories on behalf of women and earth to their critical review of Western philosophies from ancient Greeks to the age of scientific rationalism: Gaia as a liv­ing body is the one which has to be healed - and healing belongs to women - and the only one which can heal us all. In the end relationships with new spiritualities all over the world are briefly explored.

According to biologist E.O. Wilson, 'The greatest enterprise of the mind has always been and always will be the attempted linkage of the sciences and humanities', a project he calls 'consilience'. 'Ferality Tales' is inspired by Wilson's hopes, but seeks to show that the various epistemic frameworks of the disciplines can and should collaborate successfully on more equal terms than he envisages. Ferality, the condition of existing in between domes-tication and wildness, is an ideal test case for consilient research for three reasons: it is a key point of dispute between environmental ethics and animal rights; it is a subject on which scientific perspectives have changed dramatically in recent years; and it has inspired some superb fictions over the course of the 20th and early 21st centuries. As Derrida's work has prompted us to question the unitary term 'animal', however, the paper chooses to focus on feral dogs specifically. The paper attempts to locate feral dogs by triangulating from animal studies and ecocriticism; ethology and evolutionary ecology; and literary fiction, using the insights (and perhaps lacunae) of each to produce a multi-faceted, interdisciplinary projection of feral dogs.