Animate planet : making visceral sense of living in a high-tech, ecologically damaged world /

This sophisticated political ecology reveals how the reciprocal impacts between humans and the environment through industrial technology have become intimate and animate in unprecedented ways. The insightful analysis of cases from India, Japan, and the US are thought-provoking perspectives on the environmental resource categories of climate, energy, food, and water. Anthropologist Weston (Virginia) deploys ethnography, science and technology studies, social critique, and political theory to examine the paradox of the risks and benefits of high technology, wherein humans are simultaneously apart from and a part of nature. Humans are increasingly alienated from nature yet increasingly embedded in it, a symptom of the pathology accompanying modernization. For example, chapter 2 scrutinizes the unwanted intimacy of radiation embodiment generated by the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant because of damage from the massive 2011 earthquake and tsunami. The author was in Tokyo then and describes the visceral engagement experienced by many in various ways and degrees and the politics of protection. The prescription for resolving such eco-socio-techno challenges includes a reanimation of affective intimacies to transcend the maladaptive subject-object divide and re-think, re-vision, and re-feel the human and nature. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduate students and above. --Leslie E. Sponsel, University of Hawai'i