"Responses to Air Pollution Based on Historical and Current Policies in the EU and ASEAN"

The authors seek to ascertain if ASEAN can respond to regional human-induced environmental problems given existing problems of national sovereignty and the interest-based character of ASEAN-type associations, since ASEAN’s goal, in contrast to that of the EU, has been regional cooperation rather than regional integration. The aim is to highlight the status of the respective policy frameworks and exemplify areas in which the regions can learn from one another in the field of air pollution, given its global relevance for climate change.

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Life After People [Zukunft ohne Menschen]

Life After People is a television series in which scientists, engineers, and other experts speculate about what Earth will be like if humanity instantly disappears.

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"Private Investment in Biodiversity Conservation. A Growing Trend in the Western World?"

The paper examines the increasing trend of philanthropic bodies and private individuals to invest in the conservation of Australia’s biodiversity. This is seen as part of a more general Western trend in which Australian organizations are linked to bodies such as the large US-based Nature Conservancy.

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Beyond Doom and Gloom: An Exploration through Letters

“Doom and gloom” has become the de facto cultural construct not only for environmental communication but for the environmental science it seeks to communicate. We are interested in engaging in deep conversation about what it means to shift beyond “doom and gloom,” and to create movement toward more hopeful, solutions-oriented environmental narratives.

Elin Kelsey

About the author

Kelsey, Elin

Royal Roads University, Canada

My work intersects conservation biology, environmental communications, and creative non-fiction. I focus on the prevalence of “doom and gloom” environmental narratives; the hopelessness, shame and other emotional issues that arise from them; and their impact on conservation scientists, environmental communicators, children, and the broader quest for public engagement with environmental issues.

I am particularly interested in the capacity for community and ecological resilience that emerges through social networks—human, and other-than-human. While human social networks crowd-source humanitarian responses to crises, fungal networks that trees use to communicate, support faster recovery of forests following disasters. Elephants with stronger social networks have higher breeding successes. Social networks between humpback whales drive humpback population recoveries in the north Pacific, even as the marine environments in which they live grow noisier and more impacted by pollution, shipping and overfishing. For a richer exploration of these themes, please watch this video of a lunchtime colloquium I delivered at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society.

Recognition of the emotional impact of fear-based environmental narratives, and their implications for engagement with conservation, biodiversity and sustainability initiatives is gathering momentum in both academic and popular contexts. In May 2014, Elin Kelsey built upon the interest in hope generated through the RCC walking colloquium, by co-hosting a 48-hour workshop in London, England with a small group of conservation biologists, young journalists, environmentalists and designers. Together, they launched an #OceanOptimism twitter hashtag and encouraged others to share hopeful, marine conservation successes. On World Oceans Day (8 June 2014) the tweets came in thick and fast, going viral to reach over 30 million users in its first year. More than 58 million users were using the #OceanOptimism by the time this virtual exhibit opened in March 2016. See more at www.elinkelseyandcompany.com.

Browse the exhibition

About the Exhibition

Elin Kelsey

We need to overcome the narrative of hopelessness as much as we need to overcome environmental devastation. The environmental crisis is also a crisis of hope.

—Elin Kelsey

Beyond Doom and Gloom: An Exploration through Letters

“Doom and gloom” has become the de facto cultural construct not only for environmental communication but for the environmental science it seeks to communicate. We are interested in engaging in deep conversation about what it means to shift beyond “doom and gloom,” and to create movement toward more hopeful, solutions-oriented environmental narratives.

Elin Kelsey

About the author

Kelsey, Elin

Royal Roads University, Canada

My work intersects conservation biology, environmental communications, and creative non-fiction. I focus on the prevalence of “doom and gloom” environmental narratives; the hopelessness, shame and other emotional issues that arise from them; and their impact on conservation scientists, environmental communicators, children, and the broader quest for public engagement with environmental issues.

I am particularly interested in the capacity for community and ecological resilience that emerges through social networks—human, and other-than-human. While human social networks crowd-source humanitarian responses to crises, fungal networks that trees use to communicate, support faster recovery of forests following disasters. Elephants with stronger social networks have higher breeding successes. Social networks between humpback whales drive humpback population recoveries in the north Pacific, even as the marine environments in which they live grow noisier and more impacted by pollution, shipping and overfishing. For a richer exploration of these themes, please watch this video of a lunchtime colloquium I delivered at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society.

Recognition of the emotional impact of fear-based environmental narratives, and their implications for engagement with conservation, biodiversity and sustainability initiatives is gathering momentum in both academic and popular contexts. In May 2014, Elin Kelsey built upon the interest in hope generated through the RCC walking colloquium, by co-hosting a 48-hour workshop in London, England with a small group of conservation biologists, young journalists, environmentalists and designers. Together, they launched an #OceanOptimism twitter hashtag and encouraged others to share hopeful, marine conservation successes. On World Oceans Day (8 June 2014) the tweets came in thick and fast, going viral to reach over 30 million users in its first year. More than 58 million users were using the #OceanOptimism by the time this virtual exhibit opened in March 2016. See more at www.elinkelseyandcompany.com.

Browse the exhibition

The Geologic Challenge of the Anthropocene

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Perspectives Issue 2016/2

Ziolkowski tackles the problem of defining the Anthropocene from a geologic perspective, and explores how the Earth will record evidence of our existence.

Wild Earth 9, no. 4

Wild Earth 9, no. 4 features visionary essays that reimagine the future. Topics include abolitionism and preservationism, the environment and the US constitution, and the Buffalo Commons.

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“Hang on to the words”: The Scarcity of Language in McCarthy’s The Road and Atwood’s Oryx and Crake

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Perspectives Issue 2015/2

The consideration of scarcity as it is represented in literary texts can show us that the distinction of world and language is less stable than it might appear at first sight.

“Main Objective: Don’t Starve”: Representations of Scarcity in Virtual Worlds

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Perspectives Issue 2015/2

Although video games seem to be a product of a culture of abundance, they create challenges for their players by requiring them to negotiate conditions of lack, as can be seen in the recent rise in games that portray post-apocalyptic worlds in which scattered survivors have to scavenge for basic resources in barren environments and destroyed ecosystems.

Clock of the Long Now

To help imagine longer temporal perspectives, a giant clock ticking every ten seconds was built in Texas in 1999. This is a chapter of the virtual exhibition “Welcome to the Anthropocene: The Earth in Our Hands”—written and curated by historian Nina Möllers.

Welcome to the Anthropocene: The Earth in Our Hands

Together with the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, the Deutsches Museum hosted a major special exhibition on the Anthropocene from December 2014 – September 2016, which was curated by Nina Möllers. Coined by the atmospheric chemist and Nobel Prize laureate Paul J. Crutzen, the term “Anthropocene” describes the idea of a new geological era shaped by deep interventions into nature by humans as biological and geological agents.

Nina Möllers

About the author

Möllers, Nina

Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, LMU Munich, Germany

Dr. Nina Möllers is head curator and project manager of the special exhibition “Welcome to the Anthropocene: The Earth in Our Hands.” She studied in Palo Alto, Tübingen, and Nashville, Tennessee and received her PhD in 2007 with a dissertation on “Creoles of Color in New Orleans.”

As part of a post-doc project at the Deutsches Museum she curated a special exhibition on the history of energy consumption in private households. Her publications include the exhibition catalogs Kabelsalat: Energiekonsum im Haushalt (2012) and Willkommen im Anthropozän: Unsere Verantwortung für die Zukunft der Erde (2015).

She is grateful to Josephine Musil-Gutsch, Vanessa Osganian, Brenda Black, Helmuth Trischler, Iris Trautmann, Eliza Encheva, and Dorothea Föcking for their collaboration on this digital companion exhibition.