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This research aims to deconstruct the discretionary character of outdoor recreation, in view of the hegemonic nature of intersectional oppression. Once deconstructed, it also questions how outdoor recreation, inspired the Scandinavian concept of friluftsliv, can become a feminist space for resistance against this oppression. The Feminist Hiking Collective is presented as case-study.

With increasing recognition that reducing carbon emissions from energy in the UK will make a significant contribution to the mitigation of anthropogenic climate change, and with carbon budgets forged following the Climate Change Act 2005 looking unlikely to be met, it is clear that sectoral changes are required to catalyse the decarbonisation process. Alongside the need for this industry to be at the forefront of decarbonisation, the energy sector needs to diversify and employ more women, Black and Minority Ethnic (BAME), LGBT and disabled people, as well as those from different social classes and varied educational backgrounds. In short, the energy industry in the UK presently has a diversity issue that transcends being an image problem; it is hampering progress. This masters’ thesis explores how the dual aims of decarbonisation and diversifying the workforce can aid one another, and the extent to which greater diversity within the energy sector could actually be the key to decarbonisation. Using transcripts from the interviews I conducted with eight individuals, as well as meta- analysis of existing data that examines the impacts of diversity in various industries, the ways in which greater diversity in the energy sector has the potential to be positive for decarbonisation are explored. Further, this paper also examines barriers to diversity, proposing a series of recommendations for industry and policy makers in order to create an energy sector that is more diverse. These recommendations can be found in the next steps section of the paper, which aims to provide guidance for those wishing to make the composition of their organisation more representative of wider society.

<p>This dissertation explores the philosophical, cultural, and political implications of the discourse on humanity and human subjectivity in the time of the Anthropocene that engages a wide geographic and temporal range. Specifically, I examine the ways in which three selected literary works of Daniel Defoe from England, Toni Morrison from America, and Arundhati Roy from India interact with the intricately contested notions of what it means to be a human being sharing the earth’s natural habitats with another entity traditionally defined as “other,” categorized around species, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality, class, and even religion.</p><p>I argue that Defoe’s <i>Robinson Crusoe</i>, the allegedly first modern novel, inaugurates the reigning understanding of human being as <i>homo sapiens</i> represented by Crusoe’s rationalized humanity, the essential feature of which has come to engender a threatening condition both for the nonhuman and non-European world; that Morrison’s <i>Paradise</i> and Roy’s <i>The God of Small Things</i> each in their own way not only problematize and challenge the overall tenet of Defoe’s metaphysical rationality in Euro-American and Anglophone cultures, but also investigate a more secular and thereby alternative idea of human subjectivity as <i>homo ecologicus</i>, so as to either (re)construct or restore a vibrant and sustainable community based on a notion of human not as hierarchically superior to “other” entities, but more horizontally and inclusively situated within one larger common habitat called the planet Earth.</p><p>Postulating the conviction that one cannot fully understand the aforementioned alternative conceptualization of human being as <i>homo ecologicus</i> within the confines of divisive identity politics based upon racial, ethnic, national, religious, gender, and sexual orientation categories, it is a pivotal concern of my thesis to bridge the ostensibly unquestioned bifurcation between human beings and Nature: that between the West and the East, that between male and female, that between reason and intuition, and that between knowledge and life. In performing these wider ecological inquiries into radical modes of human existence, I place the core value of nonfoundationalist thoughts of Friedrich Nietzsche, Alfred North Whitehead, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, and Edward Said, among many others, in critical dialogue with the study of literature with a view to thematizing the broader question of how a literary narrative as a historical and cultural institution imaginatively reframes our self-consciousness of the precarious condition of the Anthropocene. In conclusion, I argue that the study of literature and other humanities that valorize a vital interconnectedness between humans, objects, and the environment offers the potential for an inexhaustible and enduring habitat in which <i>homo ecologicus</i> continues to, in the words of Nietzsche, “remain faithful to the earth,” embracing <i>homo sapiens</i>.</p>

<p>  </p> <p>The garden and garden like spaces are ubiquitous in the Romantic narrative and my argument engages the (neo)colonial politics involved in their creation and maintenance within and outside of the Spanish Empire: the majestic and creole garden of Colombia and Cuba, the enslaved subsistence plot or <em>conuco </em>in Cuba, and the sacred, indigenous garden of Mexico, through writers such as Jorge Isaacs, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Anselmo Suárez y Romero, Cirilo Villaverde, and Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, amongst others. I address how these garden spaces exist within and alongside of what I term the garden state: the transformation and domestication of nature through agriculture and horticulture. This is an imperial and neo-imperial environmental aesthetic that emerges in response to the rise of liberal agro-economic policies in the light of industrialization, the entrance of the West into ‘modernity,’ and the proliferation of the <em>hacienda </em>and <em>ingenio</em>. It is with the garden’s function as descriptor for nation and as discrete, enclosed space for the cultivation of nature that I engage with its capacity to mediate the politics of belonging and civilization in Romantic literature and mid-century cultural and political discourse. Traditionally read, the Romantic narrative centers around erotic productivity, through romantic couplings as a measure for the success or failure of the family. Parallel to this erotic drive, the garden state introduces a narrative of economic productivity that the presence of the garden, its creation, maintenance, and decline interrupts. The failure of the garden state parallels not only that of erotic productivity in the narratives, but rather it brings to the fore the fundamental contradictions of the civilizing project. These narratives are predicated on the continued exclusion of those exploited and displaced under the Spanish Empire—namely Indigenous Peoples, the enslaved, and women. However, as I develop a politics of belonging and labor, I posit that these same narratives complicate exclusionary politics through the environmental emplacement of their marginalized protagonists. As such their subsequent deaths or further displacement undermine the very places they were to uphold, causing the gardens’ destruction. I analyze the interaction of the politics of race and gender within the garden and garden state through death, labor, desire, and secularization to highlight the complexity of “civilization,” offering novel readings on how nature aides in questioning the broader limits of the nation in nineteenth-century Latin America and the waning Spanish Empire. </p>

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During the past decades there has been an increasing interest in the conservation of the cultural-historical character of 20th century single-family housing areas in Sweden. Many of these areas are characterised by the fact that they have changed significantly over time, creating highly diverse historic urban landscapes. However, current conservation strategies are still mainly rooted in the conserve as found paradigm where change is mainly seen as a threat to the cultural significance of the area. Therefore, this study aims to research if the changing character of the single-family housing area also can be of heritage value. By using the single-family housing area Rynninge in Örebro as a case study, the research shows that change is an inevitable part of single-family housing areas and that the underlying historical concepts and ideas of the area are manifestations of change. Change is also a cultural practice in itself being an expression of a need for intimacy and demographic composition, while also functioning as a symbol for the Swedish utopia. Since our current conservation strategies are mainly based on a sense of authenticity we will need to rethink how we define this concept. A possible way to do this is thinking about the single-family housing area as a lived authentic space, containing both static and dynamic features. This study, therefore, concludes that an alternative approach towards the changing character of single-family housing areas is needed where the changing character of the area is also part of its cultural significance and authenticity, introducing a heritage of change. By opening up to a more flexible and inclusive approach towards change this can contribute to the development of more sustainable conservation strategies in cultural, economic and environmental contexts.

Nature's non-material contributions to people are difficult to quantify and one aspect in particular, nature's contributions to communication (NCC), has so far been neglected. Recent advances in automated language processing tools enable us to quantify diversity patterns underlying the distribution of plant and animal taxon labels in creative literature, which we term BiL (biodiversity in literature). We assume BiL to provide a proxy for people's openness to nature's non-material contributions enhancing our understanding of NCC. We assembled a comprehensive list of 240,000 English biological taxon labels. We pre-processed and searched a subcorpus of digitised literature on Project Gutenberg for these labels. We quantified changes in biodiversity indices commonly used in ecological studies for 16,000 books, encompassing 4,000 authors, as proxies for BiL between 1705 and 1969. We observed hump-shape patterns for taxon label richness, abundance and Shannon diversity indicating a peak of BiL in the middle of the 19th century. This is also true for the ratio of biological to general lexical richness. The variation in label use between different sections within books, quantified as β-diversity, declined until the 1830s and recovered little, indicating a less specialised use of taxon labels over time. This pattern corroborates our hypothesis that before the onset of industrialisation BiL may have increased, reflecting several concomitant influences such as the general broadening of literary content, improved education and possibly an intensified awareness of the starting loss of biodiversity during the period of romanticism. Given that these positive trends continued and that we do not find support for alternative processes reducing BiL, such as language streamlining, we suggest that this pronounced trend reversal and subsequent decline of BiL over more than 100 years may be the consequence of humans’ increasing alienation from nature owing to major societal changes in the wake of industrialisation. We conclude that our computational approach of analysing literary communication using biodiversity indices has a high potential for understanding aspects of non-material contributions of biodiversity to people. Our approach can be applied to other corpora and would benefit from additional metadata on taxa, works and authors.

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