Multimedia | journal article
“Environmental History’s Usable Past: On Reviving the Scholarship of Synthesis”
A reflection on the historical approach to synthesis as a part of the toolbox of environmental history, with a focus on Lewis Mumford.
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Arcadia
Confidence in a Confidence Man: A Banana-Disease “Solution” in Late Colonial Jamaica
This article examines a “cure” for Panama disease in 1930s Jamaica, highlighting an attempt to profit off ecological vulnerability.
Arcadia
Peat-Powered Berlin: The Role of Peat in the Urban Energy Transition in the Mid-Nineteenth Century
Peat was a widely used fuel in mid-nineteenth-century Berlin that acted as a bridge in the energy transition between firewood and coal.
Multimedia | interviews and talks
Melinda Laituri on "Integrated Environmental History of Watersheds"
Melinda Laituri, Carson fellow from February to May 2011, talks about her research project, “Integrated Environmental History of Watersheds,” a comparative, historical-geographical analysis of the Danube and the Colorado rivers.
Arcadia
Dunes, Development, and Delay: Climate Change Comes to Long Beach
An east-coast beachfront neighborhood faces a difficult decision about how to respond to storms and rising seas.
Perspectives Article
Historicizing Risk
In “Historicizing Risk,” historian Lawrence Culver explores Ulrich Beck’s theories on the nature of risk on a temporal scale wondering how awareness and perceptions of risk changed from the “first” modernity to now, and how that relates to the global issue of climate change.
Perspectives Article
On the Role of Natural Hazards and Catastrophes
Historian Uwe Lübken examines how the perception of natural hazards and catastrophes shifts from being historically seen as “Acts of God” to now being viewed as side effects of modernization and a social responsibility.
Perspectives Article
Compressed Cosmopolitanization
In her personal essay “Compressed Cosmopolitanization,” Stefania Gallini’s recounts her feelings of dissonance of joining a reading group focused on risk and Ulrich Beck’s work at the safety of Munich, while coming from the megalopolis of Bogotá, where risk is a daily reality.
Perspectives Article
Market Solutions?
Gordon Winder’s “Market Solutions?” explores neoliberal market solutions to risk within the context of Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society and his personal conversation with the historian.
Perspectives
Revisiting Risk Society: A Conversation with Ulrich Beck
In this issue of RCC Perspectives, a group of scholars reflect on Ulrich Beck’s influential Risk Society (1986). They seek to critically historicize the concept of risk society, considering how it might be a product of its particular time and place as well as what it means for public debate and scholarship in the early twenty-first century.