Perspectives

This article looks at the controversial issue of forest conservation in the Southern Mexican state of Oaxaca.

Focusing on the Serengeti, this essay argues that nature and natural resources in Africa are framed as “inverted commons”: a special commons that belongs to the entire globe, but for which only Africans pay the real price in terms of their conservation.

This article argues that Planet Earth has entered a period of “neurogeology”: the mental states and resulting actions of individual humans, groups of humans, and the collective mental states of all humans together are creating a new mode of planetary development.

This essay will focus on the use of eco-images in unconventional visual environmental campaigns.

The Anthropocene emphasizes that all of us are collectively responsible for the future of the world. Society will have to legitimize science and technology, focusing in particular on education as one of the most powerful tools for transformation, in order to make the Anthropocene long-lasting, equitable, and worth-living.

Museum exhibitions offer a unique space for creating a three-dimensional experience of the systemic interconnectedness that characterizes the Anthropocene, as well as encouraging reflection and participatory discussion. The Deutsches Museum has decided to tackle the challenges of this new age head-on and become the first museum to create a major exhibition on the Anthropocene. While curating an exhibition, we also tackle the question of how to “curate” the planet in its literal sense of taking care of it and curing it.

In the Middle Ages, the main energy sources were firewood, charcoal, animals, and human muscle power. By 1860, 93 percent of the energy expended in England and Wales came from coal. Why did the transition occur when it did and why was it so slow?

This article considers the various factors that hindered intensification of industrial activity and retarded national economic growth. Eventually the pressure of social and cultural factors encouraged abandonment of the use of an abundant and relatively cheap resource—peat—and promoted the use of a scarcer and more expensive alternative—coal.

This article examines in detail the trends in turf production and consumption in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, noting its striking resilience.

This essay offers an historical sociometabolic perspective on the changing relationship between energy and land use during industrialization.