Perishability Fatigue : Forays Into Environmental Loss and Decay / Vincent Bruyere.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bruyere, Vincent, author.

Series:

Critical life studies.

Critical Life Studies

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Biotechnology--Social aspects.

Biotechnology.

Environmental degradation--Philosophy.

Environmental degradation.

Sustainability--Moral and ethical aspects.

Sustainability.

Mortality--Philosophy.

Mortality.

Human ecology--Forecasting--Philosophy.

Human ecology.

Civilization, Modern--21st century--Philosophy.

Civilization, Modern.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (181 pages).

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Columbia University Press, [2018]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault project is an arctic archive designed to preserve the world's agricultural biodiversity. What do it and other novel forms of storage tell us about our relationship to the future in a time of resource depletion and extinction scenarios? In this innovative book, Vincent Bruyere offers an invitation to look at the present we live in through a fresh lens: the difference between storage and burial in the age of sustainability science.Perishability Fatigue considers questions of permanence and the potentiality of retrieval, noting the tensions within our collective sense of time and finitude. Bruyere reflects on the nature and significance of perishability, asking what it means to have one's sense of temporality engendered by seed banks and frozen embryo storage, genetically modified organisms and the "de-extinction" of species, nuclear-waste repositories, oncology, and palliative care. He draws attention to the scripts and scenarios that mediate our relations to loss and decay, preservation and conservation, emphasizing the inequalities implicit in technologies of perishability, which promise continuity in the future to some while refusing it to others. A highly interdisciplinary study, Perishability Fatigue reframes the environmental humanities and humanistic inquiry into sustainability science by developing a new language to commemorate fatigue and transience in a culture of preparedness and survival.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Preface: Myrrha's Prayer

Acknowledgments

1. Being Fabulous as the Climate Changes

2. Still Life with Genetically Modified Tomato

3. Store and Tell

4. The Mortal Life of HeLa

5. Oncoscripts

6. Dispatch from the Palliative Present

Epilogue

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 23. Jan 2019)

ISBN:

9780231547949

0231547943

OCLC:

1048896472