The Hamburg Flood in Public Memory Culture
Today, the Storm Flood of 1962 forms an integral part of local and national memory culture. Public commemoration events, monuments, and media coverage assure that the disaster is not forgotten.
Today, the Storm Flood of 1962 forms an integral part of local and national memory culture. Public commemoration events, monuments, and media coverage assure that the disaster is not forgotten.
British Arctic explorers lacked local knowledge of the environments through which they passed and sometimes consulted Inuit shamans, whose geographical knowledge was known to be extensive. One expedition to seek the Northwest Passage exemplifies how they supplemented their deficit with indigenous environmental knowledge.
Part of the scientific agenda of the British Arctic land expedition of 1819-22 was to investigate whether the appearance of the aurora borealis was accompanied by any sound.
Analysing the natural and social conditions for soil nutrients in the small Catalan village of Sentmenat during the 1860s, this interdisciplinary study aims to bridge the gap between history and ecology in order to draw lessons for sustainable agricultural systems from the pre-industrial era.
A well-recorded instance of medieval conflict over aquatic resources, in this case the rich salmon fisheries of medieval Scotland, highlights the historic importance of this resource and incidentally documents technical and social elements of its exploitation.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, massive floods regularly threatened cities and settlements along the Danube River. The introduction of wide-reaching telegraph networks enabled Habsburg authorities in Vienna to protect the most important city of the empire.
The construction of a giant dam across the Strait of Gibraltar, proposed by the Munich architect Hermann Sörgel (1885–1952), would have created the largest hydroelectric facility in the world.
The Finnish-Swedish scientist Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld (1832–1901) conducted ten Arctic expeditions over the course of 25 years, from 1858 to 1883. He covered a considerably vast area: from Greenland and Spitsbergen to the Bering Strait. It is quite exceptional that a scientist of his time participated in such a number of Arctic expeditions in such a large area. His reports on the explorations, written in several languages, considerably expanded knowledge of the polar regions.
The Finnish-Swedish explorer and scientist Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld (1832–1901) became in 1878—1879 the first European explorer to sail the Northeast Passage. He was also one of the pioneers of the Nordic conservation movement, proposing the creation of national parks and the protection of endangered species.
A classic proponent of the trans-European Economic Enlightenment, the Oekonomische Gesellschaft Bern, founded in 1759, strove to optimize the use of the region’s resources in order to protect the sovereignty of the state of Bern. Its significance should not be measured according to its immediate practical effects, but rather in view of how its ideas for new forms of scientifically based natural resource usage unfolded over the long term.