Books, Poetry, Art and More

Brand New To Christian Animism? Some ideas for where to start learning

Advocacy, Action on Climate Justice and Land Reform

  1. ASLE Website: The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) seeks to inspire and promote intellectual work in the environmental humanities and arts. Our vision is an inclusive community whose members are committed to environmental research, education, literature, art and service, environmental justice, and ecological sustainability.
  2. As Long as the Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, From Colonization to Standing Rock By Dina Gilio-Whitaker
  3. Big Lonely Doug: The Story of One of Canada’s Last Great Trees By Harley Rustad
  4. Climate Justice Alliance Website: formed in 2013 to create a new center of gravity in the climate movement by uniting frontline communities and organizations into a formidable force. Our translocal organizing strategy and mobilizing capacity is building a Just Transition away from extractive systems of production, consumption and political oppression, and towards resilient, regenerative and equitable economies. We believe that the process of transition must place race, gender and class at the center of the solutions equation in order to make it a truly Just Transition.
  5. Cultural Survival Website: Our work on the front lines of advocacy with international Indigenous communities is predicated on the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and our programming works to inform Indigenous people of their rights, issues and threats affecting their communities. Cultural Survival believes that vibrant and durable communities rest on the principles of self-determination, human rights, informed citizenry and access to information, the freedom of expression, and the right to organize and shape the future in a way consistent with one’s tradition, language, culture and community – and we believe Indigenous Peoples have the power and solutions to solve many of today’s problems when respected and empowered to do so.
  6. Dark Mountain Project Website
  7. Ecologist: Informed by Nature Website: Environmental Affairs Platform
  8. Ecopeace Middle East Website: Founded in 1994, organization that brings together Jordanian, Palestinian and Israeli environmentalists to promote cooperative efforts to protect shared environmental heritage.
  9. Edge Effect Podcast The official podcast of EDGE EFFECTS, the digital magazine produced by the Center for Culture, History, and Environment (CHE) in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Each episode features interviews with path-breaking thinkers about cultural and environmental change across the full sweep of human history
  10. Fight the Fire: Green New Deals and Global Climate Jobs. Free Download By Jonathan Neele
  11. Honor the Earth.org Indigenous led intiatives to address climate chaos, destruction from fossil fuels, how to be protectors of creation. Welcome Water Protectors. The Rights of Nature. Letters to Enbridge
  12. Icarus Complex Magazine: A dedicated publication that gathers discourse about climate issue in one publication, targeted at a mainstream audience.
  13. Indigenous Foundations an information resource on key topics relating to the histories, politics, and cultures of the Aboriginal peoples of Canada. This website was developed to support students in their studies, and to provide instructors, researchers and the broader public with a place to begin exploring topics that relate to Aboriginal peoples, cultures, and histories. Indigenous Foundations was developed by the First Nations Studies Program at the University of British Columbia, located on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Musqueam people.
  14. Indigenous Knowledge Commons
  15. Meet Queen Quet, Leader of the Gullah/Geechee Nation. Interview with Marquetta L Goodwine in Fordham News by Chris Gosier 12/20
  16. Planetary Solidarity: Global Women’s Voices on Christian Doctrine and Climate Justice  By Graci Ji-Sun Kim, Hilda P Koster Eds.
  17. Seven Teachings of the Anishinaabe in Resistance Directed by Suez Taylor: LN3 features indigenous firebrands Winona Laduke, Tara Houska, and poet-hip hop artist ThomasX, as they lead an alliance to take on Big Oil and their enablers at the institutional level, and on the frontlines. This is the battle for Earth.
  18. Sharing the Earth: An International Environmental Justice Reader. Edited by Elizabeth Ammons and Modhumita Roy
  19. Silent Spring By Rachel Carson
  20. Soil and Soul: People Versus Corporate Power by Alastair McIntosh
  21. The Mother Tree Project
  22. Threshold Podcast: Threshold is a public radio show and podcast that tackles one pressing environmental issue each season. We report the story where it’s happening through a range of voices and perspectives. Our goal is to be a home for nuanced journalism about human relationships with the natural world.
  23. To Be a Water Protector: The rise of the Wiindigoo Protectors by Winona LaDuke
  24. Unceded Land: The Case for W’etsuwet’en Sovereignty
  25. Upstander Project Website
  26. Where the Leaves Fall Magazine: Where the Leaves Fall is a magazine that considers local and global experiences and knowledge as a pathway to healing our relationship with nature, with culture, with community and with our home, the Earth. We present voices that are often marginalised – such as Indigenous leaders, environmentalists and scientists – who can help us understand how to relocate ourselves in the natural world and ensure a future on Earth.
  27. https://www.resurgence.org/
  28. Yellowhead Institute: The Institute is a First Nation-led research centre based in the Faculty of Arts at Ryerson University in Toronto, Ontario. Privileging First Nation philosophy and rooted in community networks, Yellowhead is focused on policies related to land and governance. The Institute offers critical and accessible resources for communities in their pursuit of self-determination. It also aims to foster education and dialogue on First Nation governance across fields of study, between the University and the wider community, and among Indigenous peoples and Canadians. 

Animism

Art, Cinema and Video Explorations of Creation, Land and Justice

A collaboration with plants in two parts by Ian Campbell

A Line Made by Walking. Richard Long 1967. Nature has always been recorded by artists, from prehistoric cave paintings to twentieth-century landscape photography. I too wanted to make nature the subject of my work, but in new ways. I started working outside using natural materials like grass and water, and this evolved into the idea of making a sculpture by walking … My first work made by walking, in 1967, was a straight line in a grass field, which was also my own path, going ‘nowhere’. In the subsequent early map works, recording very simple but precise walks on Exmoor and Dartmoor, my intention was to make a new art which was also a new way of walking: walking as art.
(Tufnell 2007, p.39.)

Anne Campbell Artist from Isle of Lewis: My work is concerned with place, specifically with my native island of Lewis and the village of Bragar where my family have lived for many generations. I have always been interested in the interaction between the land and the living things which spend their lives here or pass through: the traces left behind, whether on the earth and stones or in the memory and imagination. I have studied this interaction through the disciplines of art, ecology and archaeology.

Apausalypse: From IMDB: Apausalypse is a creative documentary shot in Iceland during the great pause when the Coronavirus closes the world. A moment in history is captured and empty spaces are filled with art when all other stages are closed.

Dersu Uzala Film by Akira Kurasawa. Academy Award for Best International Film in 1975. Edited from IMDB: Dersu Uzala is named after the character played by Maxim Munzuk who has lived in the Mongolian/ Siberian countryside since birth. When he wanders into a Russian exploration party led by Capt. Vladimir Arseniev (Yuri Solomin) the captain hires the curious person as a guide. His knowledge and experience are unlike anything these soldiers have encountered, with his capacity to communicate with animals and understand the rhythms of the natural world. Deeply connected to the stories and life of the wilderness where he has always lived, the old Dersu Uzala tells the foreigners stories about the land proving to them that he can out-hunt and out-shoot the best of them, and managing to save the life of the captain during one snow storm. The soldiers develop a deep respect and affection for Dersu and Capt. Arseniev brings the man into his home in the city to live with him and his wife and son bringing to the family an exposure to stories and a way of living that they could not gain from anywhere else in their city life. The domesticated lifestyle doesn’t suit Dersu whose daily activities clash with the local constabulary. Dersu decides to go back to the untamed land and Arseniev gives him his best rifle to take with him. Eventaully Arseniev seeks out his old comrade but discovers that fate has intervened.

Ecoarts on the Palouse

Enough is Enough Karine Polwart and Oi Musica and the Soundhouse Choir. Video: What the Earth might say to us. This piece of music has been composed with the express purpose of inviting choirs, street bands and community groups to learn and perform it, and join an exciting, collective musical response to the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) which will be held in Glasgow in November 2021.

Hamish Fulton: Walking Artist

Literary and Cultural Plant Studies Network at the University of Arizona

Miyazaki’s Animism Abroad: The Reception of Japanese Religious Themes by American and German Audiences by Eriko Ogihara-Shchuck

Miyazaki Hayao’s Animism and the Anthropocene by Shoko Yoneyama Article Abstract: The need for a reconsideration of human-nature relationships has been widely recognized in the Anthropocene. It is difficult to rethink, however, because there is a crisis of imagination that is deeply entrenched within the fundamental premises of modernity. This article explores how ‘critical animism’ developed by Miyazaki Hayao of Studio Ghibli can address this paucity of imagination by providing alternative ways of knowing and being. ‘Critical animism’ emerged from the fusion of a critique of modernity with informal cultural heritage in Japan. It is a philosophy that perceives nature as a non-dualistic combination of the life-world and the spiritual-world, while also emphasizing the significance of place. Miyazaki’s critical animism challenges anthropocentrism, secularism, Eurocentrism, as well as dualism. It may be the ‘perfect story’ that could disrupt the existing paradigm, offering a promise to rethink human-nonhuman relationships and envisaging a new paradigm for the social sciences.

Nature: Documents of Contemporary Art. Ed by Jeffrey Kastner: “Nature, as both subject and object, has repeatedly been rejected and reclaimed by artists over the last half century. With the dislocation of disciplinary boundaries in visual culture, art that is engaged with nature has also forged connections with a new range of scientific, historical and philosophical ideas. Developing technologies make our interventions into natural systems both increasingly refined and profound. And advances in biological and telecommunication technology continually modify the way we ‘present’ ourselves. So too are artistic representations of nature (human and otherwise) being transformed.“

Spirited Away by Hayao Miyazaki. A review of this animated movie as an argument for Animism.

The Living Stage: The Living Stage combines stage design, permaculture and community engagement to create a recyclable, biodegradable and edible performance space. Part theatre and part garden, the project collaborates with local permaculturists to build ‘living’ stages that are specific to site and community. The Living Stage considers ecological principles and environmental impact as opportunities rather than constraints: ethics that can illuminate, and be integral to aesthetics.

Robert McFarlane on Landscape and the Human Heart

Stress Call of the Stinging Nettle

Tulladonna: Documentary From the 1960s and onwards, Tulladunna was home to Aboriginal cotton chippers and their families. In this short documentary, the community shares memories of living, working, and being together on country. This research was supported by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council and the Indigenous Land and Justice Research Hub at the University of Technology Sydney

Decolonization and Dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery.

The Doctrine of Discovery established a spiritual, political, and legal justification for colonization and seizure of land not inhabited by Christians. Foundational elements of the Doctrine of Discovery can be found in a series of papal bulls, or decrees, beginning in the 1100s, which included sanctions, enforcements, authorizations, explusions, admonishments, excommunications, denunciations, and expressions of territorial sovereignty for Christian monarchs supported by the Catholic Church. From: https://upstanderproject.org/firstlight/doctrine

Terra Nullius is the term used by British colonizers in Australia and Africa, to say that the land was empty and unused, and thus justifiably taken from Indigenous people already there. The link goes to an Australian educational website with interactive videos and information to further exploration of this topic. Mabo v Queensland was a landmark case fought over many years to acknowledge the dispossession of Indigenous people from their ancestral lands. In the Philippines the Regalian Doctrine was applied by the King of Spain as justification for that invasion. The link is to a 2012 UN resource reporting on meetings that engaged the legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery. Note that the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was initially opposed by the US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia.

Fiction

Memoir, Histories, and Literary Reflections

Poetry

Rewilding and Conservation

Science and Reflection about Mother Earth

Solastalgia This is a term coined by Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht, referring to the distress human beings feel in reaction to the destruction of the natural world around them due to climate chaos, and also those whose localities have been destroyed by industrial encroachment and environmental disaster.

Spirituality, Culture, Philosophy and Theology