Category: Series
The Anglophone Dilemma in the Environmental Humanities
By Dan Finch-Race and Katie Ritson
Transnational discussions of the climate crisis generally use English as a primary language so as to facilitate direct communication among a high number of stakeholders. Translations into other languages tend to be limited, if available at all. We believe that multilingualism should be an important feature of research into interactions between the human and the more-than-human.
Why Ecocriticism Needs the Social Sciences (and Vice Versa)
By Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, Alexa Weik von Mossner, W.P. Malecki, and Frank Hakemulder
Knowing that you need to tell a new story does not always mean that you know what to say, or how to say it. This is the situation we find ourselves in today.
The Great Blasket Island, Storytelling, and the Environment
By Matthias Egeler and Anna Pilz
We are standing on the headland of Dunmore Head on the western edge of Dingle Peninsula, on the western edge of Ireland, on the western edge of Europe. One moment, the slope is speckled with light, the next it is in the shadow of a heavy rain cloud. Then the winds push away the rain leaving behind a sparkling rainbow that disappears after five minutes.
Reclaiming Oktoberfest: Celebrating Sustainability Instead of Consumerism
By Elmar Ujszaszi-Müller
Every year in late September, the atmosphere in Munich becomes thicker when Oktoberfest takes place. The intense odors of roasted almonds and grilled chicken mingle with those of specially brewed lager and the sweat of thousands of people roaming the festival grounds.
A Sketch for Teaching the Anthropocene in the Alps
By Heidi E. Danzl (trans. Kristy Henderson)
The Alps can be considered a hot spot for climate change due to changing growing seasons and tree lines, species migration, more intense weather events, increased glacial melt, droughts, mudslides, avalanches, flooding, and the omnipresence of micro-technofossils. They are therefore well suited to teaching the Anthropocene and exploring its impacts. In the following, I sketch several ideas for teaching the Anthropocene based on existing cultural events, institutions, and practices within contemporary Alpine communities.
Dazzling and Dangerous: Epidemics, Space Physics, and Settler Understandings of the Aurora Borealis
By Jennifer Fraser and Noah Stemeroff
Earlier this year, Explore, a multimedia company that operates the largest live nature camera network on the planet, noticed that one of its livestreams was going viral. The feed in question broadcasts from Churchill, Manitoba. Positioned directly beneath the auroral oval, this camera offers viewers a chance to catch a glimpse of the spectacular auroral displays that grace the city’s skyline nearly three hundred days of every year.
Resisting Climate Change Apocalypticism: Environmental Justice Activism from the South Pacific
By Hanna Straß-Senol
In late 2013, an Australian newspaper reported that a man from Kiribati “stood to make history as the world’s first climate refugee.” The New Zealand High Court, before which the man appeared, rejected the claim because the category of climate refugee was not included under the United Nation’s provisions for refugees.
Book Review: Elizabeth Hennessy, On the Backs of Tortoises: Darwin, the Galápagos, and the Fate of an Evolutionary Eden
By Rodrigo Salido Moulinié
The reports said they wanted to kill the turtle. They surrounded the research station and refused to let supplies go through to the 33 people—and the colony of reptiles—inside the building. Yet the fishermen went on strike and took the building not because they hated that turtle (they did not even intend to harm it), but because of what it meant: an allegory of the politics of conservationism, development, and the local making of science.
Starhawk, Henry Vaughan, and the Environmental Imagination
By Zane Johnson
Times of widespread crisis often challenge conventional ways of being in and seeing the world. Sometimes these challenges take on a millenarian character, heralding the end of an epoch or the dawning of a new age.
“This madness has to stop!” Indigenous Voices on the Destruction of the Amazon
By Teresa Millesi
Covid-19 has had a devastating impact on Indigenous groups in Latin America, especially in Brazil, where the president Jair Bolsonaro has downplayed its severity, with his ministers calling it an “opportunity” for illegal logging in the Amazon. Horrifying videos of hospital corridors lined with corpses and pictures of mass graves in Manaus, the capital of the Brazilian state of Amazonas, are a shocking indicator of the toll the pandemic has taken on Brazil and its people.
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