Alistair Knox (1912–1986) and the Birth of Environmental Building in Australia
Environmental building in Australia as a form of communing with nature.
Environmental building in Australia as a form of communing with nature.
Wild rice was “tamed” when domesticated in the 1950s, yet both cultivated and foraged wild rice face shared contemporary challenges.
This article discusses the intimate connection between seeds and landscapes through networks of non-corporate farmers, experts, politicians, and agricultural companies.
Beginning in 2013, reindeer on South Georgia—originally brought to the island by whalers in 1911—were eradicated in order to safeguard local biodiversity.
In 1975, construction began for the Thames Barrier, a moveable flood defense located on the River Thames, downstream of central London in the United Kingdom.
In this chapter of the virtual exhibition “Drought, Mud, Filth, and Flood: Water Crises in Australian Cities, 1880s–2010s,” the authors describe how the city of Sydney, New South Wales, has pursued the dual goals of plentiful water and cheap sanitation through the construction of the massive Warragamba Dam and ocean outfall sewers. Sewage polluting Sydney’s iconic beaches saw large protests in the 1980s and 1990s and closer monitoring of the ocean outfalls. Householders successfully curtailed their water consumption during the Millennium Drought, but as soon as dam levels rose again, water restrictions were abandoned because water retailers gain financially from higher consumption.
This virtual exhibition features, in English translation, 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 German-language version of this exhibition, click here.
During the Little Ice Age’s harsh winters, frozen waterways posed challenges and opportunities in the Dutch Republic.
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 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 English-language version of this exhibition, click here.
To whom does the Northwest Passage belong? Historian Elene Baldassarri writes about the politics of the Far North. This is a chapter of the virtual exhibition “The Northwest Passage: Myth, Environment, and Resources.”