Water as White Coal
The article tells the story of the rise and decline of the significance and visibility of “white coal” and hydroelectricity over the course of the twentieth century.
The article tells the story of the rise and decline of the significance and visibility of “white coal” and hydroelectricity over the course of the twentieth century.
This volume of RCC Perspectives, featuring artwork by Australian artist Mandy Martin, is a tribute to the wonderful career of Jane Carruthers.
This issue of RCC Perspectives offers insights into similarities and differences in the ways people in Asia have tried to master and control the often unpredictable and volatile environments of which they were part
This volume of RCC Perspectives, featuring artwork by Australian artist Mandy Martin, is a tribute to the wonderful career of Jane Carruthers.
LeCain provides a detailed analysis of Chakrabarty’s “Four Theses” and its implications for humanism. This thinking diverges from that of Western Enlightenment by challenging the humanistic belief that we are separate from, even above, the material world. In fact, human culture is inextricably linked to the natural material world; we are both a force and product of it.
This essay examines what the concept of the Anthropocene means for environmental law and policy. Humans can be viewed as both insider and outsider—as an integral part of nature, which we have a duty to protect, and as lord and master of the natural world, taking what we can for our own survival. Eagle explores how the choice of an insider or outsider view can influence political discussions regarding environmental regulation.
In this essay, Watt recounts discussions with her students regarding lifestyle patterns; she shows how it will be necessary to change such patterns if we are to take climate change seriously from an economic and policy perspective, and to tackle it realistically.
These essays showcase examples from Canada and Western Europe, offering insights into how different forms of environmental knowledge and environmental politics come to be seen as legitimate or illegitimate.
Clapperton evaluates three existing frameworks for understanding Indigenous and non-Indigenous claims to know the environment. While each framework has its strengths, they reinforce a binary between Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowledge and keep salvage paradigms of Indigenous knowledge alive. Clapperton calls for an enlarged definition of Indigenous knowledge that could account for boundary-crossing and Indigenous people “doing” science.
Longley traces how geographic and cartographic knowledge of the Athabasca region, Alberta, Canada, colonized the region in the southern imagination long before the oil sands industry began extraction there. The practices of exploration, surveying, and documentation mapped the Athabasca region in terms of its rich bitumen deposits, obscuring the histories of Indigenous people. The south gained political and economic control of the region, although this process is incomplete and contested.