In the present study the effects of the literacy ecology of the home on children’s literacy development in rural Rwanda were examined. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected as part of a larger randomized control trial of a literacy intervention in eastern Africa. First, the Literacy Ecology theoretical framework is described as a frame of reference for the present study. Second, survey, ethnographic, and child-reading data are reported from a rural district in Rwanda; these illustrate connections between home and community literacy and children’s early reading achievement. Finally, future directions and implications of the findings for efforts to improve children's early literacy attainment in lower- and middle-income countries are explored.

We desribe the basic geography of Brazil, showing the major biomes, rivers, and soil distribution of Brazil

This chapter introduces approaches to materiality and biology within anthropological scholarship on sex and gender. It emphasizes how biological subfield of eco-evo-devo (which emerged in dialogue with feminist studies) can contribute to anthropological debates. The authors focus on hormones, signaling molecules that regulate many physiological processes in humans, animals, and plants. Hormones are a particularly productive site for considering how anthropologists interested in sex, gender, and bodies might benefit from additional attention to biological processes and biological knowledges, as they challenge prevailing concepts and categorical oppositions of self/world, nature/culture, and mind/matter. The authors first sketch out a history of the relationship between anthropology and biology and, within that history, how feminists have confronted biologism. They then introduce eco-evo-devo and explore how its insights about hormones and development can serve as a prompt to rethink the body within anthropology. Last, they review examples of social scientific engagement with hormones, arguing that a deeper engagement with the materiality of hormones rather than only with their popular representation can help anthropologists continue their ongoing efforts to reframe the social and apprehend gender and sexuality as entangled within complex ecologies of industrial capitalism.

One fundamental project of biology is to determine which groups of organisms are “the same” and which are different, for taxonomic purposes but more fundamentally so that one can make general, meaningful claims about specific groups. Traditional bifurcating taxonomies have been and remain useful. However, what was designed to name unchanging “natural kinds” of relatively large organisms with distinct morphologies is not adequate for grouping and dividing very small organisms, reticulated histories, endosymbiosis, horizontal gene transfer, asexual reproduction, or ecosystems. Biological explanations need to be flexible enough to account for hierarchically embedded processes and structures at vastly different scales, from the molecular to the global. Modern biology has moved beyond naming things, and biological explanations now require more sophisticated ontologies.

The writings of W. G. Sebald have inspired visual artists, who have found kinship with him through a wide variety of shared common themes. Sebald himself undoubtedly emboldened such a vibrant response from visual artists, first by imaginatively using photographs and other images as an integral part of his own books and then by collaborating with living artists in the making of two books of his poetry late in his life. Visual artists could relate to the places that he wrote about, especially the landscape and ecology of adopted home of East Anglia. Other themes that artists frequently felt they had in common with Sebald included exile, memory, trauma, the archive, history, war, colonialism. As more and more artists came to use Sebald’s writings as a jumping off point for their own work, curators began to respond by organizing major exhibitions of such work for important museums in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe.

Throughout his work, Sebald engages intensively with ecological issues which this essay examines, using the theories of Ecocriticism and Cultural and Literary Animal Studies. Two aspects of Sebald’s concept of ‘nature’ are particularly important. First, the notion of ‘nature’ in his writings proves inherently contradictory: nature is at both a self-destructive force and a precious good, subject to human destruction. Therefore, humans appear sometimes as helpless victims of the forces of nature, and sometimes as ruthless destroyers of nature. Second, in Sebald’s concept of ‘nature’ , culture and nature do not constitute opposites. Instead, man is not seen as a counterpart of nature, but as an integral part of it, as a product of a nature through which it accomplishes its self-destruction. The destruction of nature is accordingly understood as an interplay of different actors. Non-human nature (plants and animals as well as landscapes) are perceived as actors in a system in which each element contributes to the self-destruction of earth, connecting man, animals and natural world by their shared suffering.

In the context of art and literature, the term "weird" refers to a sense of anxiety or terror regarding an ecological force seemingly acting on indeterminate motivations with little or no concern for people. A diversity of factors contributed to the 1890s flourish of the weird, including the growing economic investment in environmental policy, the rise of popular occulture, and the strong general interest in the biological, geological, meteorological, and astronomical sciences that were inspiring new notions of, among other subjects, the possibility of nonhuman consciousness. While not part of an overt environmentalist initiative, the weird nevertheless brings forward perspectives on animal, vegetal, and atmospheric ontology in which natural elements are subjects worthy of recognition and respect. The fin-de-siècle weird was driven not by the question of what protections or rights should be extended to nonhuman elements of the ecologies in which we participate, but rather, more disconcertingly for many, by considerations regarding what agency these other forces – many mysterious or yet unrecognized – enact and perhaps even assume for themselves.

This chapter examines 1890s women poets through the lens of ecology. By focusing on three main parameters (countryside, city, and empire), the chapter offers a new landscape of poets and poetries of the 1890s and argues that some of the most advanced ecological thinking of the period appeared in women’s poetry. Starting with Christina Rossetti, the chapter unveils how poets of the 1890s used genres such as the pastoral, realist, and symbolist poetry paradigmatically to produce powerful critiques of agrilogistics, globalization and eco-colonialism at the fin de siècle. Central to the chapter is its focus on polluted environments. Looking at Amy Levy and Alice Meynell, it shows how their poetics of soot and grime argued for green spaces to combat the damaged caused by the coal industry to modern city living. The chapter also analyzes the anticolonial poetics of Katharine Tynan and Sarojini Naidu and their use of autochthonous plants in their fight against the British empire.

This chapter expands on the material underpinning of popular sovereignty and self-and-other-determination by theorizing racialized alienation from nature and manual labor as allowing for environmental destruction, a process mediated by technology. Diagnostically, Du Bois’s essays on development and economic value first connect the intensification of racism to western technological needs, turning upside down techno-racist claims that equated whiteness and technological superiority. Instead, he argues that racism and colonialism are necessary to procure raw materials on the cheap to secure industrial profits. Racist ideologies operate within this context to confine nonwhite bodies to strenuous manual labor close to nature. Relatedly, Du Bois contests the inferior value assigned to manual labor that follows, showing both the centrality of raw materials and manual labor to high-tech societies and clarifying its political origins. On the critical side, Du Bois first contests the desirability of speedy “development” and forced integration into the global economy, which curtails racialized peoples’ orientation toward their wellbeing. Second, Du Bois claims the technological mindset and orientation toward profit are poor standards of progress because they obscure the cooperative character of production and prevent the political imagination from envisioning new worlds.

The sixth chapter focuses on a decisive common dimension in Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day, namely, their treatment of anthropocenic and planetary concerns. These related concepts have featured prominently in recent literary studies, but studies of Pynchon’s relation to the Anthropocene are still largely absent. Moreover, recent discussions in literary criticism of anthropocenic and planetary concerns are primarily centered on works published in the twenty-first century, but the chapter shows that the concerns are extensively prefigured in the early novels of Pynchon’s global trilogy. The notion of planetarity is often seen as incompatible with the idea of globalization, but the chapter shows that the anthropocenic and planetary themes in Pynchon’s novels grow naturally out of the global and world-historical issues discussed in Chapters 1–4. At the same time, it demonstrates that Pynchon’s ideas of humanity’s harmful exploitation of the planet draw on a long tradition in American literature and on the ecological ideas of the 1960s. The chapter concludes with an analysis of how Pynchon depicts language as a significant force in the Anthropocene, and with a discussion of the trilogy’s recurring portrayal of giants as ancient planetary avatars poised to reclaim the Earth.

For most people, the most obvious thought or image that sexual reproduction brings to mind is that of sexual intercourse, a mating between two individuals of opposite sexes, which will result in the birth of their common offspring. While biparental reproduction is certainly the most common mode of sexual reproduction among all eukaryotes, it is not the only one, and the way it is carried out can depart substantially, in many different ways, from the ‘canonical’ description above. What is common to all these modes is that two distinct sexually compatible individuals (parents) undertake a sexual exchange that leads to the generation of new individuals with a genetic constitution obtained from the association and/or the reassortment of those parents’ genomes. The key event in this mode of reproduction, technically called amphigony, is the fusion of two gametes or two nuclei functioning as gametes (syngamy), each produced by one parent, to form a zygote. While in species with anisogamy (i.e. with distinct male and female gametes; Chapter 4), only gametes of opposite sex are compatible, the two individuals that produce them are not necessarily a male and a female.

We are all familiar with the changes in an organism during development, followed by its reproduction, which are repeated generation after generation. Biologists describe this development–reproduction sequence as the life cycle: the series of transformations and reproductive events that, from a given stage of life of an organism, leads to the corresponding stage in a subsequent generation. We can describe a biological cycle as going from zygote to zygote, but also from adult to adult, or from embryo to embryo: in a cyclical process, the choice of the ‘initial phase’ is arbitrary or conventional, as the notorious ‘the chicken or the egg’ dilemma beautifully illustrates.

In the course of their lives, organisms spend time and energy on a number of activities and functions, of which reproduction is only one – think of growth, defence against predators and pests, and others. How many resources are used for reproduction, how much time is devoted to it and how this time is distributed over the course of life are all elements that characterize the different reproductive strategies. From an even wider perspective, in those organisms that at certain times in their lives can opt for one or another reproductive mode (e.g. sexual or asexual reproduction, as in many plants and many marine invertebrates), a reproductive strategy includes also this reproductive policy.

On February 1997 the birth was announced of a sheep named Dolly, the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell of a mother individual. The event attracted enormous media attention. Dolly, born on 5 July 1996, actually had three ‘mothers’: one provided the egg (whose nucleus was removed), another the nucleus with the DNA picked out from a somatic cell (i.e. a cell of the body not specialized for reproduction), while the third mother carried the cloned embryo in her womb until parturition.