The stories we tell matter. They shape and frame how we identify, understand, and address challenges. Many of the sustainability stories being told and re-told have been predicated on the idea that techno-scientific solutions will be our salvation. Rarely do they deeply interrogate the cultural and aesthetic factors that contribute to our human-environment relationships. Between Two Pines builds on the growing realization that artists must contribute to and enlarge our current conceptions of sustainability. This book explores how conceptions of the sublime, beauty, and the picturesque influenced the development of our natural aesthetic sensibilities and resolves that sustainability stewardship will require the intersection of ecology, aesthetics, and ethics. Pivoting off the history of landscape photography, Cardenas proposes a sustainability aesthetic, a framework for how the arts can reposition themselves for a sustainability social practice. The book concludes with one hundred little dramas, a body of photographic work that puts to practice his sustainability aesthetic. Between Two Pines places scholarship and art on equal footing, ultimately providing a framework and examples of how art practice can and must be integrated into dialogues and narratives on transitioning into a more sustainable future.
 
“I am truly thankful that Dr. Edgar Cardenas’s thoughtful research is now available in this beautiful book. I have recommended his work to more people, both in my personal and professional spheres of my life, than I can count, and I’m glad to have this provocative and elegant publication to put into people’s hands. Cardenas shows us how each of us really can make a difference.”

The ancient Romans are well known for their love of the pageantry of power. No single ceremony better attests to this characteristic than the triumph, which celebrated the victory of a Roman commander through a grand ceremonial entrance into the city that ended in rites performed to Rome’s chief tutelary deity, Jupiter Optimus Maximus, on the Capitoline hill. The triumph, however, was only one form of ceremonial arrival at the city, and Jupiter was not the only god to whom vows were made and subsequently fulfilled at the end of a successful assignment. Ushering in a New Republic expands our view beyond a narrow focus on the triumph to look at the creative ways in which the great figures of Rome in the first century BCE (men such as Sulla, Caesar, Augustus, and others) crafted theological performances and narratives both in and around their departures from Rome and then returned to cast themselves in the role of divinely supported saviors of a faltering Republic.