Charlotte Sleigh

The Bible is bursting with teaching about nature: how God created it, how humans fit into it, and how it is part of his big story of justice, love and redemption. But what does the Bible have to say about the environmental issues that face us? These seven Bible studies explore such questions as: How well rooted are you in God's creation?, Can you take your ethics to the shops?, Does what you eat really make a difference?, Is an environmentally friendly lifestyle just too painful to contemplate?

Seven Bible studies about the environment

God's Green Book

Hardyment

Pleasures of Nature

A natural and cultural history of the ant, which opens up broader issues about the history of science and humans’ relations with the natural world.

For many, their first experience of the natural world is in the pages of books and in library collections--a Paper Zoo. This stunning book gathers together a wide range of beautiful nature illustrations from the British Library's collections, including manuscripts, prints and drawings, and rare printed books, and featuring items from all around the world. With striking images of butterflies, beetles, spiders, animals, shells, fish and birds, the pages bring readers into contact with some of the world's most renowned natural history illustrators, such as Audubon and Catesby, and on expeditions to discover the lesser known rare finds as well. The text traces the story of the art of natural history from the Renaissance through the great age of exploration to the 19th century, to demonstrate how the collaboration between the fields of art and science has rendered such exquisite forms. The plates, all taken from books, are organized into several themed sections, though not on strict taxonomic grounds, but rather on broader themes of exotic, native, domestic, and paradoxical (with reference to what the species were at that time--for what is native now may well once have been exotic).

500 Years of Animals in Art

The Paper Zoo

Ants are legion: at present there are 11,006 species of ant known; they live everywhere in the world except the polar icecaps; and the combined weight of the ant population has been estimated to make up half the mass of all insects alive today. When we encounter them outdoors, ants fascinate us; discovered in our kitchen cupboards, they elicit horror and disgust. Charlotte Sleigh’s Ant elucidates the cultural reasons behind our varied reactions to these extraordinary insects, and considers the variety of responses that humans have expressed at different times and in different places to their intricate, miniature societies. Ants have figured as fantasy miniature armies, as models of good behavior, as infiltrating communists and as creatures on the borderline between the realms of the organic and the machine: in 1977 British Telecom hired ant experts to help solve problems with their massive information network. This is the first book to examine ants in these and many other such guises, and in so doing opens up broader issues about the history of science and humans’ relations with the natural world. It will be of interest to anyone who likes natural history or cultural studies, or who has ever rushed out and bought a can of RaidTM. "[Charlotte Sleigh's] stylish, engaging and informative study deserves to win new members for the ant fan club."—Jonathan Bate, The Times

Amanda Rees

What does it mean to be human? And what, if anything, does it have to do with being a member of the animal species Homo sapiens? This dazzling book gets to the very heart of our rather unscientific motivations and prejudices, showing how they are of great use in resolving the world’s biggest problems. From beasts to aliens, this book explores widely discussed but often problematic links between humans and six other beings, tackling deep philosophical questions including humanity’s common purpose, life’s meaning, and what it means to be accepted as part of a community. Global in its outlook and illustrated with stunning pictures, Human is a powerful, funny, and iconoclastic antidote to post-humanism.

Human

Donna Landry

Karen Jones

Kaori Nagai

Caroline Rooney

Monica Mattfeld

Cosmopolitan Animals asks what new possibilities and permutations of cosmopolitanism can emerge by taking seriously our sharing and 'becoming-with' animals. It calls for a fresh awareness that animals are important players in cosmopolitics, and that worldliness is far from being a human monopoly.

Charlotte Sleigh

Books

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