Explorations
Think pieces, investigative essays, and critical reflections
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On the Scenic Beauty of Santiago: What Does the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Know About Aesthetics?
By Floris Winckel and Alice Murphy: An Ecosystem Services article from 2017 warned that under current trends in urbanization, rising temperatures, and wildfires, Santiago de Chile could suffer an alarming 18 to 28 percent drop in scenic beauty. This statistic may surprise readers. Some may find it odd, even inappropriate, to focus on aesthetics in…
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Russian Environmental Politics: Reading Between the Lines—New Climate, New Strategy: Betting on the Revival of Mammoths over the End of Fossil Fuels
By Vita Lacis: On 26 October 2023, Vladimir Putin signed a revised version of the Climate Doctrine of the Russian Federation—a high-profile document that determines the climate policies of the state on all levels, from international to municipal. Although only an updated version of the previous climate doctrine, released in 2009, the Doctrine illuminates the…
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Exploring Health–Nutrition–Ecology Relationships and Resilience through Food-Farming Practices in Thailand
By Judith Bopp: The word Lebensmittel, one of several words for food in German, translates as “means to life” in English. This concept illustrates that supplying the body with nutritional and suitable foods is the key to maintaining vitality and overall well-being. Food–health linkages have already been recognized within scientific communities (cf. Schnitter and Berry…
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Russian Environmental Politics: Reading Between the Lines—Wartime Ecology: Guns Before Forests
By Vita Lacis: Russian governmental measures at the outset of their invasion of Ukraine loosened numerous environmental regulations to prop up Russian industry and business enterprises. Two years into the war the economy still seems to be going strong. But what are the costs to the environment?
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Russian Environmental Politics: Reading Between the Lines—The Wounds of War, and What We Must Know
By Vita Lacis: On the morning of 24 February 2022, I woke up to pictures and videos of Russian tanks rolling into Ukrainian cities and Russian planes dropping bombs on Ukrainian residential areas, which look so painfully familiar to anyone who spent most of their life in an identical khrushchevka somewhere in the Murmansk region, Khabarovsk, or…
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The Anglophone Dilemma in the Environmental Humanities
By Dan Finch-Race & Katie Ritson: Transnational discussions of the climate crisis generally use English as a primary language to facilitate direct communication among a high number of stakeholders. The primacy of English is clear for the likes of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (“version complète disponible en anglais seulement,” the French list of…
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Placing Gender: Gender and Environmental History
By Katie Holmes and Ruth Morgan: Despite Carolyn Merchant’s provocative 1990 article on gender and environment in the Journal of American History, this multifaceted discipline remains an under-developed area of inquiry. For example, the European Society for Environmental History (ESEH) conference in July 2017 hosted just one panel on gender and environmental history, while presentations…
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The Uses of Environmental History: John R. McNeill
By John R. McNeill: Environmental or ecological historians do not “need to become more useful and practical” in anything. They should feel free to be useless as regards global problems if they wish. If their motives for engaging in environmental history are nothing loftier than curiosity, that is no sin. The great majority of historical…