Multimedia | film profile
The Tundra Book
The Tundra Book provides a rare and poetic glimpse into a man determined to preserve his people’s ancient culture, beliefs, and traditions.
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Perspectives
Out of Sight, Out of Mind: The Politics and Culture of Waste
Waste is never completely or permanently “out of sight.” Once discarded, it undergoes transformations, often reappearing elsewhere in new forms. In this volume of RCC Perspectives, scholars from different disciplines—from history and art history, urban geography, environmental studies, and anthropology—investigate the traces waste leaves behind in the course of its travels.
Perspectives Article
The Last Sink: The Human Body as the Ultimate Radioactive Storage Site
For the residents of Ozersk, a small town that was the home to Russia’s first plutonium plant, the health effects of radioactivity have been too-little acknowledged by governments that prefer to focus instead on measuring “exposures” and isotope measurements in the surrounding environment.
Multimedia | book profile
Energy Transitions: History, Requirements, Prospects
Vaclav Smil shows why energy transitions are inherently complex and prolonged affairs, and how ignoring this raises unrealistic expectations that the United States and other global economies can be weaned quickly from a primary dependency on fossil fuels.
Multimedia | book profile
In the Name of the Great Work: Stalin's Plan for the Transformation of Nature and its Impact in Eastern Europe
Beginning in 1948, the Soviet Union launched a series of wildly ambitious projects to implement Joseph Stalin’s vision of a total “transformation of nature.” By the time of Stalin’s death, however, these attempts at “transformation” had proven a spectacular failure. This richly detailed volume, In the Name of the Great Work follows the history of such projects in three communist states—Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia—and explores their varied, but largely disastrous, consequences.
Multimedia | journal article
"Fossilized Memory: The German-Russian Energy Partnership and the Production of Energo-political Knowledge"
This essay discusses methodological difficulties of the established concept of social memory for the analysis of energo-political discourse. It examines the case study of the German-Russian energy cooperation on the natural gas market which began with the discovery of the Urengoi gas field in 1966.
Multimedia | journal article
"Forest and Grassland: Recent Trends in Russian Environmental History"
The purpose of this article is to assess recent trends in Russian environmental history over the last five years. The author broadly traces its emergence from the foundation of the field in the 1970s and 1980s.
Multimedia | journal article
"The Origins of the Russian Chernozem Soil (Black Earth): Franz Joseph Ruprecht’s 'Geo-Botanical Researches into the Chernozem' of 1866"
This article analyses the contribution of the Austrian-born Russian scientist, Franz Joseph Ruprecht (1814–70) to the development of geobotany in general and to the controversial issue of the origins of the very fertile chernozem (Black Earth) of the steppe region of the Russian Empire.
Perspectives Article
Who Needs Rights of Nature?
Jens Kersten outlines the five possible ways of framing Nature that currently exist within our legal system.
Perspectives
New Histories of Pacific Whaling
This volume provides new histories of Pacific whaling from untold perspectives.