“Cities by the Sea: A Tale of Qingdao and Los Angeles”
In this Springs article, environmental historian Shen Hou considers the shore lives of both Qingdao and Los Angeles.
In this Springs article, environmental historian Shen Hou considers the shore lives of both Qingdao and Los Angeles.
In this Springs article, environmental historian Donald Worster delves into the material events behind cultural imaginaries in China, while asking for an ecological civilization. “Can humans learn, by subordinating their appetites to their brains, how to live on this earth intelligently and ethically?”
In this article, historian Kate Brown considers the connections between plants, biospheres, and the politics of breathing. “What can the history of controlled environments tell us,” she asks, “about how we understand the planet today?”
In this article, historian Kate Brown considers the connections between plants, biospheres, and the politics of breathing. “What can the history of controlled environments tell us,” she asks, “about how we understand the planet today?”
On Lord Howe Island, writer Cameron Muir has a run-in with a nearly extinct species: the woodhen. In the 1970s, scientists counted just 15 birds. Now the number is around 300, yet he calls this an encounter with a ghost species and contemplates how the fate of the lone bird he meets overlaps with the fate of humans.
China and the United States are in a fierce competition, but what about Europe? Spotlighting “twenty-first century ecological politics,” environmental studies and public policy scholar Sophia Kalantzakos wonders: “Can Brussels and Beijing get it right?”
Trees are also entangled with politics. In “An Otherworldly Species: Joshua Trees and the Conservation-Climate Dilemma” historian Thomas M. Lekan discusses what he considers a false choice between climate protection and conservation.
Franz-Josef Brüggemeier outlines the history one of the most crucial energy source of twentieth-century Europe in this article. “Coal returned to center stage again and again. In both world wars, coal provided the material basis for the atrocities committed and was of decisive importance in the subsequent search for lasting peace.”
Rita Brara and María Valeria Berros argue for the importance of a legal recognition of rivers. “What we want for rivers now is an institution that can be entrusted with their environmental protection on a global scale.”
A writer and literary scholar, Sule Emmanuel Egya weaves together a personal love letter to trees with accounts of having witnessed extractive wood logging in Gombe, Nigeria. To what extent can the Gombe State tree planting policy attempt to salvage such hostility toward trees?