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SI Dams: The Quest for Environmental Knowledge: Biologists, Dam-Building, and Environmentalism in the Brazilian Amazon
No full textIn the 1970s and 1980s, Brazil built several large dams in the Amazon rainforest and contracted the National Institute for Research of the Amazon (INPA) to study the environmental impact of the dams. The article explores the activities of INPA’s biologists and their role for the changing perception of dam-building. Based on INPA publications and archival material about dam-related conflicts it argues that science had little impact on the discursive paradigm shift from good to bad dams and that ‘hard’ science did not have more epistemic power than local grassroots knowledge produced by the anti-dam movement. The data gathered by the biologists had no practical value and could not prevent environmental damage. When the dictatorship ended in 1985, INPA changed sides and promoted the anti-dam agenda. What finally mattered was the ability to connect science to a political narrative
Confronting the United Nations’ Pro-growth Agenda: A Call to Reverse Ecological Overshoot
Full text linkIn this article, we enjoin the United Nations (UN) to forge a path out of our plight of multiple environmental and social crises. With other analysts, we identify ‘overshoot’ – the state in which humanity has substantially outpaced Earth’s capacity to regenerate its natural systems and to absorb our waste output – as the root cause of the existential threats we face. This dangerous condition demands rethinking our relationship with Earth and embarking on scaling down the human enterprise within policy frameworks of equity and rights. We argue that when the UN first articulated its international unity and prosperity mission, it did so within a ‘growth’ paradigm that treats Earth and its nonhuman inhabitants as mere resources at humanity’s disposal. The 1994 Cairo Conference on Population and Development reinforced this agenda, with its sharp turn away from the earlier emphasis on population concerns and their link to environmental protection. Today, it is clear that the UN’s foundational goals of peace, human rights and sustainability flounder within a growth-driven framework of human exceptionalism and nature domination. To correct course and reverse our advanced state of ecological overshoot we urge the UN to lead in contracting the large-scale variables of the human enterprise – population, economy, technosphere – and to resist co-optation by political, ideological and special interest pressures that would derail this mandate
The Sociopolitical Impact of a Natural Disaster: The Snow Disaster of the Earth-Rat Year (1828) in Northwestern Tibet
Full text linkDrawing on primary historical sources and secondary paleoclimatic data, this paper examines the significant ‘snow disaster’ (gangs skyon) that occurred in the Nagchu region of Northwestern Tibet in 1828. It places this event within the context of the ‘Little Ice Age’, a globally cold period. By analysing reports of natural disasters exchanged between the Ganden Podrang Government and local administrators, the paper argues that the snow disaster led to an ‘unprecedented’ ecological and economic crisis. This crisis resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of livestock and triggered various social and economic catastrophes. It also highlights that the Tibetan government responded by providing relief measures, including the suspension of yearly taxes. Notably, the Qing court extended substantial aid, facilitating the acquisition and replacement of livestock. This study underscores how a single climatic event can contribute to triggering various socio-political challenges in societies that are more exposed to vulnerabilities
Companion Plant Reading: Translating Vegetal Voices
Full text linkCombining Donna Haraway’s call to acknowledge non-human significant others in her Companion Species Manifesto with the ‘biocentric form of literary criticism’11 Gagliano, Ryan and Vieira, ‘Introduction’, p. xi. advocated by critical plant studies, this essay uses the agricultural practice of companion planting as a Framework for reading beyond the canon of anglicised world literature. I analyse three short stories – Sofie Isager Ahl’s ‘Naboplanter’ (‘Companion Plants’, 2018), Can Xue’s ‘鸡仔的心愿’ (‘Chick’s Heart’s Desire’, 2020) and Audrey R. Hollis’ ‘Seedlings’ (2018) – that translate between the botanical and the human realms and use vegetal voices to challenge gendered social conventions, linguistic preconceptions and lingering anthropocentrism. By planting together texts in Chinese, Danish and English intermingled with the idiom of plants, I propose messy, multimodal and multilingual translation as a fundamental figuration in our pursuit of a planetary approach to comparative literature
COSMOPOLITICS AND ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY. TOWARDS A MULTINATURAL APPROACH
No full textHow can we tell environmental histories/stories where other worlds have a place? This paper considers the value of the notion of cosmopolitics and the possibilities it offers for building a multinatural environmental history. Throughout the paper, we try a cosmopolitical approach to navigating indigenous historical worlds. To do so, we mobilised materials from the Lake Pátzcuaro region, an indigenous region in West Central Mexico, whose environmental history has been the subject of debate, examining the effects that acknowledging the plurality of worlds has for understanding the consequences of our knowledge practices and for creating different ways of relating to other worlds. 
Living with Water and Flood in Medieval and Early Modern Hull
No full textThis paper explores Hull’s histories of living with water and flood in the period between the foundation of the town in the 1260s and c. 1700, examining how the inhabitants, Corporation and Commissioners of Sewers managed and governed water in order to survive and thrive in a risky yet resilient estuarine environment. It does that as part of a bigger project utilising ‘learning histories’ drawing on Hull’s 800-year experience of living with water and flood to drive climate awareness and flood resilience in a city which has experienced major flooding in recent years and is increasingly vulnerable in the face of future climate change. Here, we utilise civic and other records to reconstruct a flood timeline for medieval and early modern Kingston-Upon-Hull, revealing a history of repeated flood events impacting the town and surrounding area in the centuries after its foundation in c. 1260. We explore who managed and governed water and flood risk, and how this was achieved, arguing that water management was a pervasive concern as well as a collective and shared responsibility which ultimately generated a ‘living with water mentality’.
 
How bogs made for borderlands: the eastern Low Countries, c. 670 – c. 1900 CE
No full textBorder scholars have radically turned away from the notion of ‘natural borders’ dictated by nature and now broadly agree that all borders are ‘artificial’ human constructs. We argue that significant causal relations between physical factors and borders nevertheless exist. We analysed the relation between distinct natural features and historical border development, using the notion of affordances and the example of raised bogs in the medieval and modern eastern Low Countries. Bog landscapes functioned as both barriers and passageways to humans through the spatiotemporal variability of these opposite affordances. At the scale of local settlement territories, large bog landscapes had the coercive power to function as borderlands separating adjacent communities. Such coercion was absent on the larger spatial scale of princedoms. The growing economic importance of peat was a crucial driver for border demarcation at both scales since the late Middle Ages. Path dependency and diplomatic risk calculation explain the long persistence of bog boundaries across successive polities
Evaluation of Circular Srategies and their Effectiveness in Fashion SMEs in Ghana
Full text linkCircular economy strategies may appear practical for business but are complex in application. Country-specific situations, taking into consideration the cultural dimensions, aid the practicality of such strategies. As part of a longitudinal research, this study sought to identify and evaluate circular strategies that could be integrated into selected fashion SMEs in Ghana. An in-depth qualitative case study was adopted to engage nineteen owner-designers of SMEs through interviews and observations. The owner-designers must have formal businesses, have been running their retail stores during the last decade and operate within the two major cities in Ghana where population growth supports economic activities. Life extension strategies were adopted for the study. The indications were that the majority of owner-designers of fashion SMEs, although practicing some circular strategies unknowingly, were not motivated to formally integrate the practice into their businesses. Cost, time, labour and consumer attitudes and behaviour were factors considered to undermine the effectiveness of adopting and implementing circular strategies in these firms. Creation of awareness of circular strategies and models for their implementation are needed to enable practitioners to imbibe circular economy principles in fashion SMEs in Ghana
Large Fires and Climatic Variability in Urban Europe, 1500–1800
Full text linkSeveral hundred large urban fires occurred in Europe during the early modern period, but they did not take place randomly. This article charts their incidence and reveals a peak in the seventeenth century, coinciding with some of the coolest periods of the Little Ice Age. This apparent paradox can best be explained by climatic variability, since overall cooling was accompanied by numerous warm, dry anomalies. While the cause of fires was usually human activity, and small fires happened frequently, this paper shows that many of the largest conflagrations of the early modern period took place in years of such hot and/or dry climatic anomalies, and closer analysis of individual fires confirms that these meteorological conditions facilitated their spread. This strongly suggests that climatic variability associated with the Little Ice Age was a major determinant of the timing of large fires in Europe. Over the same broad period, climatic disasters linked to cooler and damper conditions contributed to social and political instability, and there is evidence that this in turn undermined fire prevention and control and thus further increased the likelihood of small fires becoming large ones
Jacaranda Trees, Place and Affect: An Analysis of Australian Newspaper Articles, 1900–2023
Full text linkThe jacaranda tree, native to South and Central America and the West Indies, yet planted ornamentally on all continents (except Antarctica), inspires colonial imaginaries and outpourings of poetic verse, exerting influence as a placemaker. One of the almost fifty jacaranda species, Jacaranda mimosifolia, commonly called ‘blue jacaranda’, is native to the Andes mountains of Bolivia and Argentina, though planted in Australia starting in 1865. With purple-ish mauve, trumpet-shaped blossoms that can last weeks to two months in springtime, jacaranda trees enact forms of vegetal (tree) influence on humans while also being objectified in colonial efforts to beautify and civilise; these complex relations exist in fields of place-making and unmaking processes. This paper tracks the discourses related to this jacaranda-blooming cyclical event in Australian newspapers across 123 years (1900–2023), exploring complex multi-directional relationships that build place across vegetal affective fields and remake place in settler colonial processes. Contributing to environmental humanities’ discussions of place, power, affect and vegetal influence in Critical Plant Studies, this paper uncovers how placemaking is a multispecies and affective process, and how the vegetal is a powerful force that is also objectified in settler discourses and processes of unmaking. Journalism has prominent placemaking roles as well, transforming spaces discursively into places of meaning with social and cultural constructions; placemaking occurs both in human-plant relations and through the journalistic medium