Stephen E. Hunt
My primary research interest is within the environmental humanities. This includes 'Green Romanticism' – taking an ecocritical approach to the Romantic era and its continuing legacy. Within this field, particular interests include the Kurdish ecology movement, human well-being and the natural environment, the great apes, women writers on seaweed and garden cities. I am on the Executive Committee of the Angela Carter Society and a member of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE).
Publications include:
The Revolutionary Urbanism of Street Farm: Eco-Anarchism, Architecture and Alternative Technology in the 1970s (Bristol: Tangent Books, 2014).
'Power to the People: Renewable Energy in Brenda Vale’s Albion' in Paula Farca (ed.) Energy in Literature (Oxford: Trueheart, [forthcoming July 2015]). See: http://www.trueheartpress.co.uk/content/coming-soon-energy-literature
'The Echoing Greens: The Neo-Romanticism of Earth First! and Reclaim The Streets in the U.K.', Capitalism Nature Socialism, 24 (2), May 2013, 83-101.
'Francis Kilvert and Birds' Marsh', The Journal of the Kilvert Society Vol. 34 (March 2012), 135-138.
Green Romanticism: The Natural World and Human Well-Being, 1775-1900 (VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, 2011).
Book Review ‘Alexandra Harris, Romantic Moderns', Green Letters Vol. 15 (Autumn 2011), 108-110.
Birds' Marsh: The Unfinished Story (Salisbury: Hobnob Press / Chippenham Museum, 2010).
Anarchism in Bristol and the West Country to 1950, no. 14 in Radical Pamphleteer series (Bristol: Bristol Radical History Group, 2010).
‘The Emergence of Psychoecology: The New Nature Writings of Roger Deakin, Mark Cocker, Robert Macfarlane and Richard Mabey’, Green Letters Vol. 10 (2009), 70-77.
Yesterday's To-Morrow: Bristol's Garden Suburbs, no. 8 in Radical Pamphleteer series (Bristol: Bristol Radical History Group, 2009).
‘Friends of our Captivity: Nature, Terror and Refugia in Romantic Women’s Literature’, 273-296 in Inside Out: Women Negotiating, Subverting, Appropriating Public and Private Space, ed. by Teresa Gómez Reus and Aranzazu Usandizaga (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008).
‘Yesterday’s To-Morrow’, The Land, 5 (Summer 2008), 57-58.
‘Yoked together: Anti-slavery and animal welfare’, The Vegan, Winter 2005, 24-25.
‘“Free, Bold, Joyous”’: The Love of Seaweed in Margaret Gatty and Other Mid-Victorian Writers’, Environment and History 11 (1), February 2005, 5-34.
‘Ilford Manor’ in Writing the Land: An Anthology in Aid of Friends of the Earth, ed. by Kevan Manwaring (Bath: Awen Press, 2003).
Book Review: Karen Jones, Wolf Mountains: A History of Wolves Along the Great Divide in Environment and History 9 (3), August 2003, 362-364.
‘Wandering Lonely: Women’s Access to the English Romantic Countryside’ in Reading Under the Sign of Nature: New Essays in Ecocriticism, ed. by John Tallmadge and Henry Harrington (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2000), 51-63.
‘Percy Bysshe Shelley’, The Vegan 9 (1), Spring 1993, 16-17
I completed a PhD thesis entitled Persephone Unbound: The Natural Environment, Human Well-Being and Gender, 1775-1900, validated through the University of the West of England,in 2003. My supervisors at Bath Spa University were Richard Kerridge, Jeremy Hooker, William Hughes, Jeff Rodman and Robin Jarvis at the University of the West of England. Mr examiners were Tim Fulford, Terry Gifford and Greg Garrard.
I was a p-t lecturer for modules on 'European Thought and Culture' and 'Film Studies' at Bath Spa University 1994-2000.
I completed a MA thesis entitled 'Green Earth's Rural Chronicles: John Clare as Naturalist and Environmentalist' at the University of York (1991), under the supervision of Hugh Haughton.
I am a qualified Librarian, with a Diploma in Library and Information Studies from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth (2006). I am Library Academic Support Coordinator at UWE Bristol, based within the Faculty of Business and Law. I have taught on the Information Contexts module of the MSc Information and Library Management course at UWE.
I have a CELTA qualification from the University of Bristol, awarded in 2017.
Publications include:
The Revolutionary Urbanism of Street Farm: Eco-Anarchism, Architecture and Alternative Technology in the 1970s (Bristol: Tangent Books, 2014).
'Power to the People: Renewable Energy in Brenda Vale’s Albion' in Paula Farca (ed.) Energy in Literature (Oxford: Trueheart, [forthcoming July 2015]). See: http://www.trueheartpress.co.uk/content/coming-soon-energy-literature
'The Echoing Greens: The Neo-Romanticism of Earth First! and Reclaim The Streets in the U.K.', Capitalism Nature Socialism, 24 (2), May 2013, 83-101.
'Francis Kilvert and Birds' Marsh', The Journal of the Kilvert Society Vol. 34 (March 2012), 135-138.
Green Romanticism: The Natural World and Human Well-Being, 1775-1900 (VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, 2011).
Book Review ‘Alexandra Harris, Romantic Moderns', Green Letters Vol. 15 (Autumn 2011), 108-110.
Birds' Marsh: The Unfinished Story (Salisbury: Hobnob Press / Chippenham Museum, 2010).
Anarchism in Bristol and the West Country to 1950, no. 14 in Radical Pamphleteer series (Bristol: Bristol Radical History Group, 2010).
‘The Emergence of Psychoecology: The New Nature Writings of Roger Deakin, Mark Cocker, Robert Macfarlane and Richard Mabey’, Green Letters Vol. 10 (2009), 70-77.
Yesterday's To-Morrow: Bristol's Garden Suburbs, no. 8 in Radical Pamphleteer series (Bristol: Bristol Radical History Group, 2009).
‘Friends of our Captivity: Nature, Terror and Refugia in Romantic Women’s Literature’, 273-296 in Inside Out: Women Negotiating, Subverting, Appropriating Public and Private Space, ed. by Teresa Gómez Reus and Aranzazu Usandizaga (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008).
‘Yesterday’s To-Morrow’, The Land, 5 (Summer 2008), 57-58.
‘Yoked together: Anti-slavery and animal welfare’, The Vegan, Winter 2005, 24-25.
‘“Free, Bold, Joyous”’: The Love of Seaweed in Margaret Gatty and Other Mid-Victorian Writers’, Environment and History 11 (1), February 2005, 5-34.
‘Ilford Manor’ in Writing the Land: An Anthology in Aid of Friends of the Earth, ed. by Kevan Manwaring (Bath: Awen Press, 2003).
Book Review: Karen Jones, Wolf Mountains: A History of Wolves Along the Great Divide in Environment and History 9 (3), August 2003, 362-364.
‘Wandering Lonely: Women’s Access to the English Romantic Countryside’ in Reading Under the Sign of Nature: New Essays in Ecocriticism, ed. by John Tallmadge and Henry Harrington (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2000), 51-63.
‘Percy Bysshe Shelley’, The Vegan 9 (1), Spring 1993, 16-17
I completed a PhD thesis entitled Persephone Unbound: The Natural Environment, Human Well-Being and Gender, 1775-1900, validated through the University of the West of England,in 2003. My supervisors at Bath Spa University were Richard Kerridge, Jeremy Hooker, William Hughes, Jeff Rodman and Robin Jarvis at the University of the West of England. Mr examiners were Tim Fulford, Terry Gifford and Greg Garrard.
I was a p-t lecturer for modules on 'European Thought and Culture' and 'Film Studies' at Bath Spa University 1994-2000.
I completed a MA thesis entitled 'Green Earth's Rural Chronicles: John Clare as Naturalist and Environmentalist' at the University of York (1991), under the supervision of Hugh Haughton.
I am a qualified Librarian, with a Diploma in Library and Information Studies from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth (2006). I am Library Academic Support Coordinator at UWE Bristol, based within the Faculty of Business and Law. I have taught on the Information Contexts module of the MSc Information and Library Management course at UWE.
I have a CELTA qualification from the University of Bristol, awarded in 2017.
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Books by Stephen E. Hunt
Using the anti-colonial lens of social ecology, Stephen E. Hunt considers mini real-world case studies for diversifying and democratising the ways we might grow, share, and eat. Gleaning such examples takes us from La Via Campesina, the world’s largest food-sovereignty network, to efforts to preserve indigenous knowledges; from radical material sciences using hemp, seaweed, and fungi to the defiant trees and fruits of revolutionary Rojava; from proliferating kleingärten to micro-projects at home, such as an inner-city growing community where refugees sprout hope, and Japanese Shumei cultivation unexpectedly thriving in a Wiltshire hamlet.
Social ecology is a powerful set of conceptual principles for transforming our relationship to food. It offers a critique of existing supply chains that all too often shackle producers and consumers alike in dependency and poverty. But it also sparks different conversations about how we might delink and reconnect into food chains that are more intricate, and ultimately more resilient. It signals priorities not just to meet social needs and for ecological survival but for human liberation and pleasure, and flourishing sustainability.
This radical history of swimming is a verrucas and all account of swimming in Bristol, from the eighteenth-century Rennison’s Baths in Montpelier, to the beautiful historic baths at Jacob’s Wells and Bristol South, and the mostly overlooked pools in more recent leisure centres. Many readers will have memories of a world of award patches, metal baskets, disinfecting footbaths, poolside “Please refrain from…” posters, and even slipper baths.
This book argues that accessible swimming facilities should be cherished and defended, but also ideally developed, for the enjoyment of the next generation. It surveys 50 swimming pools and bathing places in Bristol, and the surrounding towns of Portishead, Thornbury, Severn Beach, Clevedon, and Keynsham.
The purpose of this book is two-fold. First, it is to discover and reveal some of Angela Carter’s non-literary influences during her formative years as a writer in the West Country. Second, its primary intention is to take her location in 1960’s Clifton, Bristol and 1970’s Walcot, Bath as a point of departure to explore the broader artistic, radical and experimental communities that flourished in those years.
Based on new oral-history interviews and primary sources, Angela Carter’s ‘Provincial Bohemia’ offers new perspectives on Angela Carter’s experience of alternative Bristol with its radical politics and creative arts scene, exploring its influence on the three novels set in the city Shadow Dance (1966), Several Perspectives (1968) and Love (1971).
Here ‘The Smoke-Dragon’ is accompanied by Stephen E. Hunt’s new essay on this unexplored area of Carpenter’s work. He finds that Carpenter can be credited with renewing the issue of smoke abatement in public debate during the late 19th century, and that the topic is of a piece with his broader thinking about social justice, class and health inequalities.
Smoke pollution from burning coal was endemic in 19th century cities. Smog not only provided the ‘London particular’ for the evocative Victorian melodramas of Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson but caused thousands of premature fatalities in real life. It was a mass killer that blighted the lives of entire urban communities in Carpenter’s own Sheffield and throughout centres of industry, right up to its tragic culmination in the notorious Great London Smog of 1952.
There have significant improvements in air quality due to reduced coal burning in the West since the Second World War. Nevertheless, in the present day the World Health Organisation still considers air pollution to be ‘the world’s largest single environmental health risk’. The increase in petrochemical smog caused by sources such as vehicle emissions ensures that outdoor air pollution continues to exact a catastrophic death toll in the world’s megacities. Even in Bristol, recently a so-called ‘Green Capital’, it is estimated that around 200 early deaths can be attributed to poor air quality each year.
Bruce Haggart), a London-based collective of anarchist architects working in the early 1970s.
The three friends put together Street Farmer, an underground paper that, alongside mutating tower
blocks, cosmic tractors and sprouting one-way signs, propagated ideas for the radical transformation
of urban living which they called ‘revolutionary urbanism’.
Taking inspiration from Situationism and social ecology, Street Farm offered a powerful vision of
green cities in the control of ordinary people. As well as writing and drawing, the group took part in
street activism and squatting, were exponents of autonomous housing and radical technology and
became rock ’n’ roll architects, going on the road with multimedia slideshow presentations to a
recorded soundtrack of music by the likes of John Lennon and Jefferson Airplane.
In 1972 Caine built and designed ‘Street Farmhouse’ with Haggart and other friends. It hit national and
international headlines as the first structure intentionally constructed as an ecological house,
appearing on an early BBC documentary introduced by a youthful Melvin Bragg. While their fame was
brief, their ongoing influence on prominent green architects including Howard Liddell, Brenda Vale and Robert Vale and Paul Downton has been more enduring.
Papers by Stephen E. Hunt
On Bristol’s march for climate justice in November 2021, it was heartening to hear calls for “system change not climate change” and see placards proclaiming that “capitalism is the crisis”. This signals that the solutions need to go beyond just recycling cans, consuming green products and even disinvestment from fossil fuels. Yet, beyond the slogans, how do we create a society based on social justice and ecological sustainability? There are few examples of efforts to put such principles into practice. However, unreported by the mainstream media, ecological experiments are underway in North-East Syria, in hugely challenging circumstances.
conclude with a consideration of some of the challenges and opportunities available to the development of such models.
The predominantly Kurdish areas of Syria (Rojava) Turkey (Bakûr), Iran (Rojhelat), and Iraq (Başȗr) have become sites of distinctive, although frequently overlooked and still under-researched, ecological struggles. This is perhaps unexpected, given the competing political demands and the arid and semi-arid environmental conditions that prevail in much of this oil-rich region. Moreover, the Kurdish ecological experiments are not a loosely adopted environmentalism limited to “nature” appreciation or single-issue “green” concerns, but a thoroughgoing political ecology, grounded in principles of social ecology. With notable parallels, such as the ecological aspect of Mexico’s Zapatista movement, the Kurdish initiatives are significant as a thoroughgoing attempt to implement a programme philosophically inspired by social ecology in the context of a living revolution […]
Here, there is a focus on the Kesiyên kesk project, variously translated as “Green Tress(es),” “Green Braids,” or “Green Strands,” an impressive current example of such efforts. This is a non-governmental, non-profit initiative for tree-planting launched in October 2020. Green Tress shows not only the considerable ecological challenges that confront the region, but also the determination to address such issues positively with an effective collective response.
[nb this is an English version of an essay published in French]
Using the anti-colonial lens of social ecology, Stephen E. Hunt considers mini real-world case studies for diversifying and democratising the ways we might grow, share, and eat. Gleaning such examples takes us from La Via Campesina, the world’s largest food-sovereignty network, to efforts to preserve indigenous knowledges; from radical material sciences using hemp, seaweed, and fungi to the defiant trees and fruits of revolutionary Rojava; from proliferating kleingärten to micro-projects at home, such as an inner-city growing community where refugees sprout hope, and Japanese Shumei cultivation unexpectedly thriving in a Wiltshire hamlet.
Social ecology is a powerful set of conceptual principles for transforming our relationship to food. It offers a critique of existing supply chains that all too often shackle producers and consumers alike in dependency and poverty. But it also sparks different conversations about how we might delink and reconnect into food chains that are more intricate, and ultimately more resilient. It signals priorities not just to meet social needs and for ecological survival but for human liberation and pleasure, and flourishing sustainability.
This radical history of swimming is a verrucas and all account of swimming in Bristol, from the eighteenth-century Rennison’s Baths in Montpelier, to the beautiful historic baths at Jacob’s Wells and Bristol South, and the mostly overlooked pools in more recent leisure centres. Many readers will have memories of a world of award patches, metal baskets, disinfecting footbaths, poolside “Please refrain from…” posters, and even slipper baths.
This book argues that accessible swimming facilities should be cherished and defended, but also ideally developed, for the enjoyment of the next generation. It surveys 50 swimming pools and bathing places in Bristol, and the surrounding towns of Portishead, Thornbury, Severn Beach, Clevedon, and Keynsham.
The purpose of this book is two-fold. First, it is to discover and reveal some of Angela Carter’s non-literary influences during her formative years as a writer in the West Country. Second, its primary intention is to take her location in 1960’s Clifton, Bristol and 1970’s Walcot, Bath as a point of departure to explore the broader artistic, radical and experimental communities that flourished in those years.
Based on new oral-history interviews and primary sources, Angela Carter’s ‘Provincial Bohemia’ offers new perspectives on Angela Carter’s experience of alternative Bristol with its radical politics and creative arts scene, exploring its influence on the three novels set in the city Shadow Dance (1966), Several Perspectives (1968) and Love (1971).
Here ‘The Smoke-Dragon’ is accompanied by Stephen E. Hunt’s new essay on this unexplored area of Carpenter’s work. He finds that Carpenter can be credited with renewing the issue of smoke abatement in public debate during the late 19th century, and that the topic is of a piece with his broader thinking about social justice, class and health inequalities.
Smoke pollution from burning coal was endemic in 19th century cities. Smog not only provided the ‘London particular’ for the evocative Victorian melodramas of Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson but caused thousands of premature fatalities in real life. It was a mass killer that blighted the lives of entire urban communities in Carpenter’s own Sheffield and throughout centres of industry, right up to its tragic culmination in the notorious Great London Smog of 1952.
There have significant improvements in air quality due to reduced coal burning in the West since the Second World War. Nevertheless, in the present day the World Health Organisation still considers air pollution to be ‘the world’s largest single environmental health risk’. The increase in petrochemical smog caused by sources such as vehicle emissions ensures that outdoor air pollution continues to exact a catastrophic death toll in the world’s megacities. Even in Bristol, recently a so-called ‘Green Capital’, it is estimated that around 200 early deaths can be attributed to poor air quality each year.
Bruce Haggart), a London-based collective of anarchist architects working in the early 1970s.
The three friends put together Street Farmer, an underground paper that, alongside mutating tower
blocks, cosmic tractors and sprouting one-way signs, propagated ideas for the radical transformation
of urban living which they called ‘revolutionary urbanism’.
Taking inspiration from Situationism and social ecology, Street Farm offered a powerful vision of
green cities in the control of ordinary people. As well as writing and drawing, the group took part in
street activism and squatting, were exponents of autonomous housing and radical technology and
became rock ’n’ roll architects, going on the road with multimedia slideshow presentations to a
recorded soundtrack of music by the likes of John Lennon and Jefferson Airplane.
In 1972 Caine built and designed ‘Street Farmhouse’ with Haggart and other friends. It hit national and
international headlines as the first structure intentionally constructed as an ecological house,
appearing on an early BBC documentary introduced by a youthful Melvin Bragg. While their fame was
brief, their ongoing influence on prominent green architects including Howard Liddell, Brenda Vale and Robert Vale and Paul Downton has been more enduring.
On Bristol’s march for climate justice in November 2021, it was heartening to hear calls for “system change not climate change” and see placards proclaiming that “capitalism is the crisis”. This signals that the solutions need to go beyond just recycling cans, consuming green products and even disinvestment from fossil fuels. Yet, beyond the slogans, how do we create a society based on social justice and ecological sustainability? There are few examples of efforts to put such principles into practice. However, unreported by the mainstream media, ecological experiments are underway in North-East Syria, in hugely challenging circumstances.
conclude with a consideration of some of the challenges and opportunities available to the development of such models.
The predominantly Kurdish areas of Syria (Rojava) Turkey (Bakûr), Iran (Rojhelat), and Iraq (Başȗr) have become sites of distinctive, although frequently overlooked and still under-researched, ecological struggles. This is perhaps unexpected, given the competing political demands and the arid and semi-arid environmental conditions that prevail in much of this oil-rich region. Moreover, the Kurdish ecological experiments are not a loosely adopted environmentalism limited to “nature” appreciation or single-issue “green” concerns, but a thoroughgoing political ecology, grounded in principles of social ecology. With notable parallels, such as the ecological aspect of Mexico’s Zapatista movement, the Kurdish initiatives are significant as a thoroughgoing attempt to implement a programme philosophically inspired by social ecology in the context of a living revolution […]
Here, there is a focus on the Kesiyên kesk project, variously translated as “Green Tress(es),” “Green Braids,” or “Green Strands,” an impressive current example of such efforts. This is a non-governmental, non-profit initiative for tree-planting launched in October 2020. Green Tress shows not only the considerable ecological challenges that confront the region, but also the determination to address such issues positively with an effective collective response.
[nb this is an English version of an essay published in French]
Oral presentations and public speaking are an important aspect of the student experience in the United Kingdom higher education. Many modules (self-contained units normally within a programme of study) use
Publication Date: August 2016
Publication Name: ALISS Quarterly
Vale self-categorizes Albion in a genre of libertarian utopian literature which includes William Morris’s News From Nowhere (1890), Ethel Mannin’s Bread and Roses (1944), and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976). Albion fits Margaret Atwood’s definition of speculative fiction as it explores the implications of an imagined post-carbon, post-nuclear future scenario, envisioning and exploring the potential for a different social reality. Vale demonstrates that the alternative way in which Albion’s society powers its technological infrastructure is closely linked to the empowerment of its citizens. The unity of purpose in aspiring to both social egalitarianism and ecological resilience makes Albion one of the very few novels, alongside Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974) and Robert Nichol’s Arrival (1977), to be embedded in the outlook of social ecology. Sceptical of the notion that ecological degradation can be solved through the expenditure of capital generated by unfettered economic growth, Vale rejects technocratic strategies and market-driven mechanisms to cost the Earth. Albion’s narrative therefore constitutes an attempt to think through the environmental challenges that confront humanity with increasing urgency.
that Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre identify as Romantic anti-capitalism. Their ecowarriors therefore echo green and amplify sentiments dating back to the Romantic period and take forward a historical tradition at a time of triumphant globalization when pundits were proclaiming "The End of History." They aspired to what Graham St John terms an “alternative cultural heterotopia” in the here and now, creating the kind of “Tactical Autonomous Zones” Hakim Bey encouraged as microcosms of a post-Capitalist society. Among the 19th century themes and tactics deployed in activist discourse are enclosure, Luddism, alienation, civil disobedience and festivity.
In their resistance to the social dominance of the car, road and oil industries, EF! and RTS sought to disrupt business as usual both physically, through direct action, and by “culture jamming” the global structures of political and economic power they regard as complicit in climate change, environmental destruction, injustice and militarism. Subsequently a new generation of activists in Climate Camp, Rising Tide and Plane Stupid continued to oppose
open-cast mining and airport expansion to prevent climate change.
Our poster presentation reviews the literature on student emotions towards reading, and how these influence their practices. We use this visual representation when liaising with academic colleagues to co-create and facilitate collaborative reading activities.
Considerations of student ‘affect’ foreground the motivational dimensions of the reading experience; we look at both pre-existing psychological and emotional barriers to engagement, and incentives and enablers that encourage confident reading and enjoyment of academic texts. We consider how the research literature supports and informs our practical reading workshops. We hope activities such as reading circles and text-mapping relieve the individual from sole accountability for comprehension, bringing reading ‘out from the dark’. Deconstructing the process of reading through roles contributes towards the co-construction of understanding and knowledge, activating fresh insights.
Discussion of reading through this shared approach potentially helps to develop student confidence, to nurture feelings of belonging, and to enhance cohort identity. However, we recognise that higher education comprises a diverse body of students, with a wealth of differences in cognitive abilities, backgrounds, and cultural experiences. Through this literature review, it is intended that learning from work already published will contribute towards evolving best practice in channelling agency and easing anxiety in academic reading for all students.
This paper, co-presented with Jane Saville, Tom Edge, and Tasha Cooper, was originally a joint conference paper at the Association for Learning Development in Higher Education (ALDinHE) Conference 2023.
Street Farm – architects, renewable energy technicians, producers of alternative media and films – constructed the first Ecological House in London, 1972. First storyboarded in Street Farmer magazine, this was an innovative attempt to give the source of their inspiration in Situationist and social ecologist rhetoric practical form. Street Farmer Graham Caine explained ‘It’s far more than a house; it’s an energy system within itself’. The ‘revolutionary structure’ he designed not only featured wind-power generation but was about the figurative unwinding of political and economic power. The Street Farmers deemed that in developed societies, both East and West, reliance upon centralised ‘capital energy’ facilitated the social control of populations.
Brenda Vale and Robert Vale, fellow pioneers of autonomous housing and alternative technology, likewise took inspiration from social ecology, particularly Murray Bookchin’s ideas about liberatory technology, to inform their experimental designs. The Autonomous House (1975) drew upon the tradition of literary utopias. Brenda Vale’s novel Albion (1982), which explores the character of a post-fossil fuel, post nuclear society, added to this genre.
In the context of Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything (2014) which documents capitalism’s failure to reverse exponential increases in carbon emissions during the intervening years, Street Farm and the Vales’ modes of energy transition merit reappraisal.
When the existence of the great apes was confirmed by Europeans, during the seventeenth- and eighteenth centuries, the social significance of this fact was demonstrated in Linnaeus’s decision to classify them together with humans as primates. The Systema Naturae signified the revolution in taxonomy that was identified by Foucault as the moment of transition to the modern episteme in biology and ultimately precipitated Darwin’s theory of natural selection.
Nowhere is the uncertainty of the human-animal boundary more pronounced than in attitudes towards apes and monkeys. My intention is to illustrate this debate through literary texts in which simians appear, in Donna Haraway’s phrase, as ‘odd boundary creatures.” Apes became figures of great veneration for the literary intelligentsia during the Romantic period since thinkers such as Rousseau and Monboddo began to consider the repression of nature as a central deficiency of modern industrializing society rather than necessary to the progress of civilization.
I have selected three novels to demonstrate some of the social contentions in which the orang-utan is implicated. Isaac D’Israeli’s Flim-Flams! of 1805 features an Aunt who gives birth to an ape. In 1817 Sir Oran Haut-ton, an ape who becomes a Member of Parliament, appeared in Thomas Love Peacock’s Melincourt. Edward Trelawny kills an attacking orang-utan but later decides that the species has nobility in his Adventures of a Younger Son (1831). The political dimensions of the ape debate are clear in all three novels in which the body of the orang-utan is frequently inscribed with contemporary assumptions about gender and ethnicity. The question asked of the orang-utan whether it be a noble savage or simply a savage beast, accorded with a similar debate about non-European peoples and women, both held to be closer to nature than culture. The great apes, represented as inhabitants of the threshold between nature and culture, make a point of comparison which is often more than metaphorical. In an essay entitled “Sur Les Femmes”, Diderot assured his readers, presumed to be male, that while woman are “more civilised than us on the outside, they have remained savages within.”
This is a book review of Naomi Klein, No is not enough: defeating the new shock politics ([London]: Allen Lane, 2017. Originally published on the Bristol Radical History Group website: http://www.brh.org.uk/site/book-reviews/no-not-enough/