What is a Whale? Cetacean Value at the Bering Strait, 1848–1900
Bathsheba Demuth looks at the value of whales for indigenous peoples around the Bering Strait.
Bathsheba Demuth looks at the value of whales for indigenous peoples around the Bering Strait.
Ryan Tucker Jones recounts how environmental activist organizations came into conflict with indigenous groups in the Bering Straight.
Adam Paterson and Chris Wilson consider Ngarrindjeri contributions to Southern Australia’s nineteenth-century whaling industry.
Jonathan Clapperton details the importance of whaling to Puget Sound Coast Salish people (Puget Salish) along the Pacific Northwest Coast.
Billie Lythberg and Wayne Ngata explore what it means to be whale people in the modern whaling period.
Joshua L. Reid concludes that the history of Pacific whaling has undergone a scholarly renaissance.
Katie Ritson reflects on the changing North Sea coast, linking its geological history and literature to the bigger picture of time and hope.
In “Historicizing Risk,” historian Lawrence Culver explores Ulrich Beck’s theories on the nature of risk on a temporal scale, and asks how awareness and perceptions of risk changed from the “first” modernity to now, and how that relates to the global issue of climate change.
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.
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 in safe Munich, while coming from the megalopolis of Bogotá, where risk is a daily reality.