Review of Pushing our Limits: Insights from Biosphere 2 by Mark Nelson
Krishna AchutaRao reviews the book Pushing our Limits: Insights from Biosphere 2 by Mark Nelson.
Krishna AchutaRao reviews the book Pushing our Limits: Insights from Biosphere 2 by Mark Nelson.
In this Review Essay, Karyn Pilgrim uses a vegetarian ecofeminist framework to examine the ethics of meat eating, arguing that a moral ambivalence prevails in the rhetoric of some popular nonfiction books that embrace omnivorous eating.
The idea for this virtual exhibition came out of the joint Russian-Austrian research project “The Long-Term Dynamics of Fish Populations and Ecosystems of European Rivers.” Analyzing the history of fish populations in the Neva and Viennese Danube, the Russian-Austrian research group discovered numerous links between the great cities and their great rivers, including the fish populations. The project has been supported by the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society.
In this chapter of their virtual exhibition “‘Commanding, Sovereign Stream’: The Neva and the Viennese Danube in the History of Imperial Metropolitan Centers,” the authors discuss how the growing population required a lot of food and fish was significant part of the city dwellers’ diets. Social stratification led to the clear division between fish commodities for the wealthy and those for poor citizens, though some kinds of fish could be popular among all dwellers, regardless of social differences.
Jeremy Brice draws on ethnographic fieldwork among winemakers in South Australia to look at pasteurisation as a way to unsettle the assumption that only individual organisms can be killed, rendering other sites and spaces of killing visible.
Analyzing the Volcanoes National Park in Rwanda, Munanura et al. examine how livelihood constraints in poor forest-adjacent communities influence illegal forest use.
Greear examines the contemporary trend toward de-industrialized and decentralized production and its implications for ecological sustainability. He suggests we can understand the potential positive ecological implications of such trends by reconceptualizing “incomplete information” in markets, which is often understood as a key way in which markets fail to solve or forestall environmental problems.
Drawing on sources ranging from gardening books and magazines to statistics and oral history, Andrea Gaynor’s book challenges some of the widespread myths about food production in Australian cities and traces the reasons for its enduring popularity.
Lindsay Kelley investigates the multispecies power structures playing out in two of Beatriz da Costa’s projects, Dying for the Other and the Anti-cancer Survival Kit.