“Moby Dick” in the Rhine: How a Beluga Whale Raised Awareness of Water Pollution in West Germany
In 1966, a stray beluga whale swimming up and down the polluted Lower Rhine caught the media’s attention in West Germany.
In 1966, a stray beluga whale swimming up and down the polluted Lower Rhine caught the media’s attention in West Germany.
In this Special Section on the Green Economy in the South, Peter Howson reflects on the Sungai Lamandau REDD+ demonstration activity in Indonesia. He focuses on “intimate exclusions” – everyday processes of accumulation and dispossession among villagers and small-holders – to highlight the hazards of developing REDD+ projects structured with limited sympathy for marginalized actors.
Kimberly R. Marion Suiseeya draws attention to the persistent justice debates in Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation plus the enhancement of carbon stocks (REDD+) and the role of norms in constraining and shaping policy designs and outcomes.
This collection contributes a sustained analysis of the beginning of major Canadian environmental debates between the 1960s and 1980s, and examines a range of issues related to broad environmental concerns, topics which emerged as key concerns in the context of Cold War military investments and experiments, the oil crisis of the 1970s, debates over gendered roles, and the increasing attention to urban pollution and pesticide use.
This German-language version of Sabine Wilke’s virtual exhibition features short excerpts from German-language literary texts that address human-nature entanglements. The aim is to show how literature can contribute to understanding and problematizing the relation between humans and nonhuman nature. What aspects of human-nature relations are addressed, at what point in literary history, and how are they shaped poetically? For the English-language version of this exhibition, click here.
In this chapter of the German-language version of her virtual exhibition, “Mensch und Natur in der deutschen Literatur (Human-Nature Relations in German Literature),” Sabine Wilke shows how topics of pollution and waste in German-language writing reach back to the nineteenth century, when the production of industrial waste—and pollution of the air, ground, and water—first began to occur on a massive scale. For the English-language version of this exhibition, click here.
In episode 47 of Nature’s Past, a podcast on Canadian environmental history, author Ryan O’Connor discusses the ENGO Pollution Probe and the early years of environmental activism in Canada with Sean Kheraj.
The authors detail their experience of Puchuncavi, the largest, oldest, and most polluting industrial area in Chile. They approach it from a multidisciplinary viewpoint as an experience of the Anthropocene and advocate for an enhanced pedagogy of care born of our inherited pasts and of engagement, interest, and becoming as response-ability.
Have you ever wondered what big data baseball has to do with air pollution? In Episode 7 of Crosscurrents, host John Sandlos speaks with Dr. Anthony Heyes, an environmental economist researching the impact of urban air pollution.
A noxious air forces Mexico City to confront its unwavering urbanizing and industrializing mission in the late twentieth century.