This introductory chapter presents the paradoxical status of ageing today: most people wish to live long, yet nobody really wants to get old… Ageing still appears as a scary, unknown country. The present book, concluding almost ten years of research on ageing, aspires to bring a fresh look on what becoming older may entail. It has a double aim. First, as a basic goal, it proposes a new theory of psychological development in older age. Second, it highlights the importance of the environments in which people age, and the role of well-thought-out policies to support development with age; it has thus a more applied goal. This introductory chapter then presents the outline of the volume.

This chapter introduces the reader to how the oil industry mobilizes political support from publics. It argues that historically, the sector has shied away from grassroots politics, or employed short-lived, financially secretive front groups. However, today this is changing. Oil firms’ contemporary outreach is apt to take the form of visible, far-reaching, and long-term campaigns that openly tout partnership between companies and citizens. This style of organizing troubles the neat binary between grassroots politics and corporate public relations. To address this, the chapter suggests we think of all political mobilization as “manufactured publics,” emphasizing the strategizing, labor, and mixture of interests inherent in all contentious political efforts. This theoretical lens allows us to explore both the affective realities of people who join pro-oil groups and the corporate interests that shape these campaigns.

This chapter explores strategy as a key driver of organizational design, emphasizing that structure should align with strategic intent. It introduces four strategic archetypes: reactors (no clear strategy), defenders (efficiency-focused), prospectors (innovation-driven), and analyzers (balancing both). It also discusses digital business strategy, showing how AI and digitalization reshape decision-making, operations, and innovation. Sustainable strategy is introduced, integrating economic, environmental, and social goals (People, Planet, Profit) to enhance resilience and competitiveness. The chapter concludes with strategy misfits – misalignments between strategy and goals – and the need to adjust one or the other. It ends by addressing how the environment influences strategic choices.

Chapter 2 compares three narratives that construe landscapes as multi-scalar relational fields. In Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004), Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes (1999), and A. S. Byatt’s ‘A Stone Woman’ (2003), environments are cast not as settings but as living actors of the story. I read these poetics through anthropologist Tim Ingold’s conceptualisation of landscape as a meshwork of entangled lines of life, to suggest that these fictions turn landscapes into mediators connecting human with ecosystemic scales, and biological temporality with ‘geostory’. My analysis focuses on the recurring trope of the microcosm, which allows fiction to explore large-scale ecological disruption through smaller organisms and environments. The microcosm, I argue, is a figure in tension, which acts here simultaneously as a trans-scalar viewing instrument and as a disruptor of relations between scales. I read this trope as a critical tool of ecological awareness because it foregrounds and questions scalar collapse – the epistemic projection of one scale onto another.

Global environmental change is on the rise and has detrimental effects for most humans. Violent conflict is also increasing. The environment is almost always a victim of conflict, and conflict activities are always shaped by the environment. Understanding the interactions between the environment and conflict is difficult because of their complexity. This chapter reviews the broad literature on the environment and conflict and introduces the analytical framework that forms the core of this book.

Victorian literature translated the systemic organization of extraction-based globalization into aesthetic structure. This chapter shows how literary forms like the multiplot novel and lyric poem strained and changed shape to account for the world-spanning mechanisms of imperialism, colonialism, and an extraction-based fossil capitalism that reshaped “the environment” across the nineteenth-century British imperium. Describing a “supply-chain sublime,” it shows how the improvement and development valorized by John Stuart Mill (and before him, John Locke) had material corollaries in scarred and abandoned zones that rarely focalize canonical works. Seen in this context, exhibits like Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–2), Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds (1873), and Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (1867) recode extractive globalization into signals we can detect, but only with an “environmental” reading practice that construes ecological matters to inhere in sociopolitical conditions, and that sees environmental issues as finally moral ones too.

Chapter 3 discusses the critical potential of environmental synecdoche in works of fiction that question the autonomy of human agency. Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007) and Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy (2014) mock fantasies of control by portraying humans as inseparable from multi-scalar assemblages and symbiotic associations. I read these novels as experiments in the cognitive modelling of agency at unfamiliar scales: both the microscale of a postgenomic imaginary and the macroscale of planet and species demanded by Anthropocene awareness. These fictions, I suggest, explore the difficulty of reconciling environmental responsibility with the dispersal of agency inherent to biomedical and ecological perspectives. Both novels experiment with multi-scalar tropes as a means of modelling agency at unfamiliar scales and enabling environmental response-ability. In each narrative, I contrast the lure of analogical images with the poetics of critical synecdoche, which engages productively with the complexity of diffuse environmental agency.

This chapter highlights key findings from the five pillars of the framework and environmental peacebuilding, focusing on future pathways and implications for the environment in conflict, and simultaneously promoting human and environmental flourishing.

This chapter explores the limited response of the League of Red Cross Societies and the Red Cross and Red Crescent movement to the wider turn towards ‘the human environment’ in the 1970s. It investigates the role played by Secretary General Henrik Beer and his efforts to mobilise National Societies to the dangers of environmental degradation and pollution, and to develop preventative environmental health campaigns and new systems for pre-disaster planning. The role of the League during the 1972 UN Stockholm Conference is examined, as is Beer’s relationships with Maurice Strong, Barbara Ward (Lady Jackson) and Dr Irena Domanska, former President of the Polish Red Cross, who chaired the League’s Health and Social Service Advisory Committee and was an early champion of the environment and the role of the Red Cross. The influence of Soviet aligned National Societies and Cold War politics is also explored.

The land now called Australia was settled by humans between 50,000 and 65,000 years ago, and the lands and waterways sustained balanced life until 1788 when a fleet of British soldiers, settlers and convicts landed on the central east coast. This chapter traces the ways theatrical works stage ‘land’ that has been transformed and depleted by the interrelated actions of colonialism, deforestation and pastoralism. It features the ecological content and staging of three works: Yanagai! Yanagai! by Yorta Yorta and Gunaikurnai woman Andrea James (2003), Louis Nowra’s (1985) The Golden Age and The White Earth by Andrew McGahan and Shaun Charles (2009). These depict violent land-grabs violent land-grabs, massacres, stubborn farming practices and ignorance of the environment as an ecosystem with a long history of human habitation. This chapter looks at the problem of ongoing ecological damage and struggles to develop sustainable land practices.

Six: I again reverse the focus so as to reflect on the cormorant’s role as an icon of indigeneity providing an unexpected parallel to the role of its cousin the pelican, outlining the latter by way of the Australian children’s book Storm Boy and then turning back to the cormorant to show how it too has at times acquired status both as a marker of indigeneity and as a local victim of human environmental destruction, notably in images of cormorants affected by oil spills, drawing in particular on a Gulf War poem by Tony Harrison and on an image in the writing of Jean Baudrillard. I conclude by returning to the longstanding association of cormorants and China through an analysis of an advert for HSBC (‘The World’s Local Bank’), assessing the co-option by capital of the cormorant’s new-found and hard-earned sense of global belonging.

I introduce the cormorant and its cultural history as ‘hated’ bird, noting that the book is both the history of a bird and a book about greed and prejudice. I distinguish between the zoological cormorant and the cultural cormorant, and I describe the cormorant’s centrality to conflict between the fishing industry and environmentalists, not least in Europe, and I also address the tendency of tree-nesting cormorants to kill their nest trees with their droppings. I then turn to parts of the world (Norway, Japan, China) where cormorants have at times been viewed positively, but I finish by noting the variety of ways – often contradictory ways – in which the bird has been understood as evil and has been the object of prejudice.