Geoffrey and Susan Jellicoe ‘The Landscape of Man. Shaping the environment from Prehistory to the present day’

Throughout history men have molded their environment to express or to symbolize ideas – power, order, comfort, harmony, pleasure, mystery. The means by which this has been achieved have varied in scale and composition, from small gardens to complete cities, but it is Geoffrey and Susan Jellicoe's distinction to have realized that they are manifestations of a single process, and to have linked them all together. To qualify as a 'landscape of man', an environment must be deliberately shaped at a specific time. Taking twenty-eight cultures, the authors first summarize the social and intellectual background, then describe how this expressed itself in terms of landscape, and finally demonstrate their case in a series of picture-spread showing what actually happened. The ground covered includes ancient Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, the Moslem world, medieval Europe, India, china, Japan, pre-Colombian America and the post-Renaissance West in all its phases. The last section, about a fifth of the whole, is devoted to planning since 1945.

Timothy Morton ‘Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Human Coexistence’

Timothy Morton argues that ecological awareness in the present Anthropocene era takes the form of a strange loop or Moebius strip, twisted to have only one side. Deckard travels this oedipal path in Blade Runner (1982) when he learns that he might be the enemy he has been ordered to pursue. Ecological awareness takes this shape because ecological phenomena have a loop form that is also fundamental to the structure of how things are. The logistics of agricultural society resulted in global warming and hardwired dangerous ideas about life-forms into the human mind. Dark ecology puts us in an uncanny position of radical self-knowledge, illuminating our place in the biosphere and our belonging to a species in a sense that is far less obvious than we like to think. Morton explores the logical foundations of the ecological crisis, which is suffused with the melancholy and negativity of coexistence yet evolving, as we explore its loop form, into something playful, anarchic, and comedic. His work is a skilled fusion of humanities and scientific scholarship, incorporating the theories and findings of philosophy, anthropology, literature, ecology, biology, and physics. Morton hopes to reestablish our ties to nonhuman beings and to help us rediscover the playfulness and joy that can brighten the dark, strange loop we traverse.