To Dig a Well (in Siberia)
In 1947, inhabitants of Yakutsk gained access to potable groundwater from below the permafrost layer for the first time.
In 1947, inhabitants of Yakutsk gained access to potable groundwater from below the permafrost layer for the first time.
Eileen Crist critiques the recent proposal to name our current geological epoch “the Anthropocene.”
Palsson and Swanson’s article explores the relationship between geology and social life in the Anthropocene, using the notion of “geosocialities.”
Paul Gillen explores the role of conscious human agency leading up to the Anthropocene, suggesting that the development of sentience in the Phanerozoic eon exerted an influence on the interaction of minerals and life.
What is Particular about Munich’s Environment?
In this chapter of her virtual exhibition “Human-Nature Relations in German Literature,” Sabine Wilke discusses texts that register transformations of landscapes or take a position on their causes. For the German-language version of this exhibition, click here.
In this chapter of her virtual exhibition, “Human-Nature Relations in German Literature,” Sabine Wilke examines mountains and glacial environments in German-language literary descriptions. Whereas the German Romantic poets still highlighted mountainous nature as deeply ambiguous, Goethe’s Faust tried to understand mountainous nature in its materiality through scientific studies. Modernism focuses on the more often destructive results of human-nature entanglements. For the German-language version of this exhibition, click here.
In this special issue on Multispecies Studies, Hugo Reinert places multispecies studies in conversation with the geological turn by examining the place of a particular sacrifice stone in the ambit of a coastal mining development in northern Norway.
In this special issue on Multispecies Studies, Cary Wolfe and Maria Whiteman discuss the changing notions of landscape and nature at work in the video installation Mountain Pine Beetle and explores some of the forces that eventuated in the devastated landscapes of the Rocky Mountain West brought on by the infestation of the mountain pine beetle beginning in the early 2000s—an infestation caused, in no small part, by what some scientists have called a perfect storm of circumstances created by global warming.