Without doubt the transformative moment came in the mid-nineteenth century, when the various German states began shifting from wood to coal as a fuel source to feed the new steam engines coming from Great Britain…
Detailed examination of the fabric records suggests that there is no simple, direct relationship between coal use and fabric repair costs. Complicating the relationship are a whole set of complex human systems involved in identification of decay, the style of restoration and management of the repair work.
The paper provides a case study of the range of preoccupations which the statutory planner, agricultural interests and mineral developer brought to bear on the conflict arising from the early twentieth-century development of the Yorkshire ‘concealed’ coalfield.
Director Bernhard Sallmann returns to Lusatia to complete his trilogy about the region by exploring its dreamscapes, orienting himself somewhere between the scars of an industrial past and signs that nature is beginning to reclaim the degraded environments that remain.
As Czechoslovakia’s communist planners continually increased norms for power and coal production in the 1950s through 1970s, the sprawling surface mines of the north Bohemian brown coal basin expanded voraciously, swallowing 116 villages and parts of several larger cities by 1980.
Jens Schanze documents the impact on the residents of Otzenrath, a seven hundred-year-old village in North-Rhine Westphalia, following their relocation in order to make way for the Garzweiler II open-pit, brown coal mine.
James C. Williams’s history of energy development and use in California.
Barbara Freese takes us on a rich historical journey that begins hundreds of millions of years ago and spans the globe. Coal is a captivating narrative about an ordinary substance with an extraordinary impact on human civilization.
Eagle Glassheim, Carson Fellow from February until April 2012, talks about his research project on the ethnic, social, and environmental transformation of Czechoslovakia’s Border Lands after 1945.
Over the last two centuries, human beings have come to rely on ever-increasing quantities of energy to fuel their rising numbers and improving standards of living. In this volume of RCC Perspectives, scholars from around the world consider how our relationship to energy has changed, why it has changed, and how it may change in the years to come.
