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SI Dams: Science-based 'greenwashing' of large dams in Ethiopia: The case of the Gibe III dam
No full textAs an extremely water rich country with ambitions to become a regional power, Ethiopia has been among the most active African countries in building hydropower dams, with construction works intensifying since the 1990s to the present day. While environmental concerns related to this kind of large infrastructural projects have remained largely unaddressed or only considered in terms of their impact on local livelihood activities, the construction of the Gibe III dam in 2006 (by that time the largest dam in the whole country) brought these concerns into the spotlight. International advocacy campaigns criticising the social and environmental impacts of the dam forced the Ethiopian government and its private partners involved in the construction work to more explicitly take position on the topic. This article aims to explore how environmental concerns emerged and came to be discussed with relation to large dam building in Ethiopia, as well as how the idea of environmental protection was framed differently from supporters and detractors of the dam. It shows that even when environmental concerns make it through development planning, this might simply be greenwashing and not necessarily have transformative results
Senses SI: A Sense of Class: Representations of Embodiment in Cornwall’s Subterranean Environments, c.1850-1910
No full textExamining the tales of visits into Cornish mines in the late-nineteenth century, this article argues that middle-class representation of miners’ bodies as simultaneously both robust and vulnerable was indebted to encounters with the physical environment. It takes a sensory lens to demonstrate that the mine was not a homogenous space, and that the different sensory environments of the mine shaped class interactions in particular ways. In doing so, this article makes two distinct contributions. Firstly, it demonstrates that doing environmental history in unconventional settings offers new accounts of class relations. Secondly, it attends to the importance of integrating sensory and embodied considerations into environmental histories of work, not only because labouring bodies often lie at the heart of industrialism, but because the class relations latent within these industries were also prefigured on frameworks of sensory norm
Theodore P. Lianos, 'Capitalism, degrowth and the steady state economy. Debating future economic models'
No full textPlant Intelligence in Moist Spaces: Designing Data Visualisations of Botanical Life
Full text linkAt the beginning of the twenty-first century, when the life sciences and computer science were in full bloom, new media practices based on computer technology were being integrated into living systems, for which new media artist Roy Ascott proposed the concept of ‘moist media’ – a medium born from the intersection of dry digital media and moist biological systems. This reflection on creative practice takes moist media as the context, plants as the medium, and botanical life as the research context. My digital art depicts the life phenomena of plants through data visualisation to explore the practical value of plants as creative media. The form, technology, and thematic elements of data visualisation of life can work together in the context of moist media to expand the space of communication between humans and plants
Plants as Designers of Better Futures: Can Humans Let Them Lead?
Full text linkThis research explores the idea of plants as designers and discusses approaches that humans can use to support plant’s productive agencies. It argues that plants have unique and valuable capabilities for creating and caring for their environments. Human interventions often overlook or constrain such capabilities. In response, the article proposes to use numerical modelling to better understand plants better while challenging the anthropocentric assumptions that are common in design. It focuses on large old trees in Tasmania as examples of outstanding plant-designers that need more recognition and protection. The article also raises open questions for further research on the ethical, ecological, and aesthetic implications of vegetal design
Tree Biographies and the Cultural History of Place at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew*
Full text linkTrees can be invested with, and accumulate, cultural history and meaning. In gardens they are often also markers of events, entangled relationships, journeys and ideas, and are central to the making of place. This article introduces and discusses the notion of ‘tree biographies’ developed from the object biography approach common in museum studies. Through this interdisciplinary process, the unique significance and cultural value of a tree can be fully recognised alongside a deeper understanding of its contribution to the landscape. An example of this approach, used at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, is presented in discussion of the biography of a deodar cedar from India. This article concludes by addressing the opportunities this methodology can present and how, by exposing the fascinating histories of such potent objects, we can animate the story of our landscapes
Green Box Programme in China: From Slow Violence to Slow Hope?
Full text linkThis short video explores the potential story of slow hope by looking into how Cainiao, a global delivery company, runs its packaging recycling programme at a pick-up station in Shenzhen, China. Online shopping and efficient delivery logistics have redefined consumption habits and urban landscapes in contemporary China. In 2024, the number of packages moving around the country reached 100 billion, according to statistics from the National Post Office. During the Double Eleven Shopping Festival in November 2024 alone, the number of packages spiked to 700 million. Seeing the mountains of packaging waste produced on a daily basis, the Chinese delivery company Cainiao started a recycling programme called Green Box in 2016. To date, the award-winning Green Box programme has covered over 100,000 pick up stations in 315 cities in China. While many celebrate the company’s environmental and social governance – potentially a story of slow hope for positive environmental change (Mauch 2019), the programme’s operation specifics remain obscure. In this video, Duan Jiaqi, Qin Xiaoyi and Lu Ziyu show more perspectives from one of the pick-up points in Shenzhen. They found that the corporate responsibility programme has continued to rely on the informal network of urban waste collection by rural migrants, and its implementation is limited by various factors
Senses SI: Echoworlds and Mole-Thinking: Imagining the Nocturnal Sensorium in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Scientific Investigations
No full textIn this article we track the relationship between transforming ways of engaging with animal Otherness in the context of Western scientific writing from the mid-eighteenth through to the early twenty-first century. Specifically, we engage with studies of dark-adapted sensoria. There are few species which seem to have presented such a challenge to the Western, post-enlightenment capacity to imagine Otherness, than those which dwell in darkness. Indeed, naturalists became increasingly confident across the course of the period that variable combinations of technologies and experiments enabled some degree of access to the sensory depths of the animal body. Animals’ fleshy forms, and sensory systems, were conceptualised as bodies of potential knowledge. However, these investigations into animal sensing were highly contextual and reveal as much about the human animal – and its imagined place in the wider world – as they do the animals under study
Senses SI: Westward Blow the Winds of Empire: Knowing Imperial Climates in the Nineteenth Century Gulf South
No full textAtmospheric knowledge, especially of the winds, was central to nineteenth-century understandings of health and place. The climate contained an array of pathological and curative phenomena, all of which relentlessly engaged the body. In the United States Gulf South, the drive to eradicate expressions of non-white autonomy in the region and repopulate it with white citizens framed the impulse to make sense of these phenomena. As settlers moved into the southeastern borderlands, they frequently commented on the direction, consistency, and temperature of the winds. Efforts to understand and record a kaleidoscopic array of winds were inextricable from the ambitions and anxieties of US empire. Physicians and settlers used this knowledge to both differentiate their region and connect it to global currents in the world. This paper seeks to recover the layers of embodied experience and medical knowledge of the winds that swept across the region. In doing so, it explores how theories of wind both underwrote and complicated visions of U.S. sovereignty. It further shows how efforts to make sense of a climate that cultivated both health and disease was part of a larger project of establishing white hegemony on the southern frontier. At the same time, physicians and climatologists used winds to begin addressing a question of localism versus universalism in medical thought, asking, for instance, at what scale winds might cause disease. Winds implicated residents in intensely local experiences of climate that were at the same time tethered to broader patterns of race and place, trade and nation-building, environment and empire
Community Pressure Drives Population Pressure: Evidence of Social Influence on Israeli Fertility
Full text linkIsrael presents an anomalous fertility case: the non-Jewish sectors demonstrate dramatic fertility decline whereas the Jewish sectors maintain perplexingly high fertility rates. Traditional explanations of demographic trends focusing on economic development, educational level, women’s empowerment or contraceptive availability fall short in explaining the current situation. A national online survey (n=602) conducted in April – May 2020 explored a wide range of drivers of fertility behaviour trends. Descriptive analysis supported by further multivariate linear regression analysis identified congruence with social influence as central factor contributing to high fertility rates and the homogeneity within Israel’s disparate Jewish communities. Strong statistical correlation was found between answers to questions relating to desired family size, ideal family size, perceptions of average family size in one’s community and actual fertility. Additionally, the number of siblings and the number of children currently in a family affect fertility, whereas other demographic factors, including education and income levels, were not statistically significant. Increased understanding of these social factors can contribute to more effective population policies in Israel and other high-fertility countries