Down to Earth: Nature's Role in American History
US history from an environmental perspective.
consumption
Neon Metropolis: How Las Vegas Started the Twenty-First Century
Hal Rothman’s Neon Metropolis is a colorful and absorbing account of Las Vegas’s rise from the desert landscape of the American West to the cutting edge of metropolitan growth and development.
Global Environmental Challenges of the Twenty-First Century: Resources, Consumption, and Sustainable Solutions
In five major sections, this edited collection investigates the interaction of population growth, consumption, and environment; the emerging crisis in freshwater around the globe; global climate and atmosphere (including global warming); biodiversity loss; and the concept of sustainable development using natural resources to place future human development on a sustainable path.
Das Gift kommt zurück [The toxins return]
The film looks at how toxic substances, banned in Europe, pass through ports such as Hamburg in containers shipped from Asia, and how these toxins can be traced in the clothing and children’s toys transported.
Invention of the Franklin Stove
American “Founding Father” and inventor Benjamin Franklin creates an advanced heating system.
Themes:
Regions:
Thirst
The documentary reveals how water can become a catalyst for explosive community resistance to globalization.
Delivery
A prize-winning short film about a man who, living a lonely life under dark clouds of industrial smog somewhere in a futuristic city, receives a mysterious package enabling him to change his environment.
Episode 7: "E-Waste and Obsolescence"
Sean Kheraj discusses the problem of e-waste with the author of Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America, Giles Slade.
"Selling the 'Untold Wealth' in the Seas: A Social and Cultural History of the South-east Australian Shelf Trawling Industry, 1915–1961"
Between 1915 and 1961 a state-run trawling industry operated on the South-east Australian shelf targeting tiger flathead (Neoplatycephalus richardsoni) as its principal species…
"Frontier Foods for Late Medieval Consumers: Culture, Economy, Ecology"
This essay considers medieval long distance trades in grain, cattle, and preserved fish as antecedents to today’s globalised movements of foodstuffs.