Introduction

In this episode Sharae Deckard analyses the unprecedented commoditization of new ecological commons under neoliberal capitalism and reflects on the importance of environmental humanities approaches to historicize conceptions of environment and configurations of environment. Humanistic approaches challenge the functional economic calculus of profit and loss which broach ecological issues only in terms of cost-benefit analyses or hazard rather than ethics and politics, and encourage the sciences to incorporate historicized analysis of the complexity of social and cultural factors, into conceptions of earth systems and evolving technologies.

Sharae Deckard

Dr. Sharae Deckard is a Lecturer in World Literature at UCD. Her research interests intersect environmental criticism and world-systems approaches to ecology, literature, and culture. Her monograph, Paradise Discourse, Imperialism and Globalization, was published by Routledge in 2010, and she recently edited a special issue of Green Letters on global and postcolonial ecologies. She has published multiple articles on postcolonial ecocriticism in Green Letters, Moving Worlds, Interventions and several edited collections, and is currently working on a new research project exploring representations of neoliberal ecology in contemporary Ireland, during the Tiger and after the bust. She is also involved in co-editing a special issue of JWSR on "Ireland and the World-System."