Under the direction of David Brower, the Sierra Club issued photographic books, cards, and calendars featuring charismatic images of nature in a state of pristine grandeur or untrammeled intimacy to expand its membership and promote its environmentalism.
The photo exhibition “Our Only World,” opened at the Smithsonian Institution in 1974, is conceivably the first example of a photo exhibition in which a national government consciously employed photographic eco-images to emphasize the complexity of environmentalism and to sanction specific behavioral patterns.
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.
This article argues that a paradigm change in political anthropology might be reasonable and realistic as a way of establishing dams against human self-destruction in the Anthropocene.
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.
The essay suggests that what is absent from the scientific discourse on the Anthropocene is a postcolonial perspective that points out the fact that we are not talking about generalizable social, economic, and cultural structures and belief systems, but that instead we are describing very specific political, economic, and discursive regimes of power.
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?
The introduction of new energy carriers and of engines able to transform energy into mechanical work was a necessary, although not unique, condition of modern growth in Europe and subsequently in the rest of the world.
As agents of knowledge and appropriators of technology, exhibitions (and most notably museum exhibitions) have played an important role in the early twentieth century, when gas and electricity, the quintessential modern energy sources, aimed to oust wood, coal, and peat while simultaneously competing intensely with each other.
This essay explores connections between energy regime changes and nutrition, as well as the impact of such changes on nutritional knowledge and food policies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
