In his comment on the Papal encyclical Laudato si’, Bruno Latour considers Pope Francis’s attention to the earth and the poor, and what this means for the Catholic Church.
Vanesa Castán Broto critiques sustainable development agendas that approach green cities as merely engines of economic growth.
Rob Krueger argues that art provides a way of framing the disconnect between “green metropolitanization” and its emancipatory potential.
This essay explores the possibility of “slow hope” for positive environmental change.
The authors develop “composting” as a metaphor for their two main arguments: that certain feminist concepts and commitments are foundational to the environmental humanities, and that more inclusive feminist composting is necessary for the future of the field.
Nicholas Babin´s review of the book Organic Sovereignties by Guntra A. Aistara.
While English satire magazines mocked vegetarianism since the 1840s, the first German caricatures appeared some 30 years later. Early drawings often imagined that a vegetarian would gradually transform into a plant. Other recurring topics are the assumed correlation between (meatless) nutrition and (peaceful, fragile) physical appearance and character, as well as the debate over whether a meat-rich or a meat-free diet was better for human health.
In the nineteenth century, there was much debate about the question of which way of living could be regarded as “natural.” Caricatures on vegetarianism mock ideas of the “natural” relationship between animal and man, and draft utopian as well as dystopian visions of a vegetarian future.
Since vegetarian societies began to spread and organize events in Germany, their missionary attitude and their supposed moral superiority have been ridiculed. Caricatures mocked the rigid rules of the vegetarians and their societies, accusing them of hypocrisy or of reinterpreting the self-imposed prohibitions according to their own needs and weaknesses.
In the early phase of the vegetarian movement, satirists playfully imagined how this diet and worldview affected different aspects of culture. Other cartoons make fun of the fact that vegetarianism quickly became a trend that was seen as sign of the Zeitgeist of the 1880s. Surprisingly, they overlooked the fact that vegetarianism was indeed intended as a sociocultural reform that could contribute to social and gender equality.
