Milestones of the Anthropocene | Welcome to the Anthropocene
This is a chapter of the virtual exhibition “Welcome to the Anthropocene: The Earth in Our Hands”—written and curated by historian Nina Möllers.
This is a chapter of the virtual exhibition “Welcome to the Anthropocene: The Earth in Our Hands”—written and curated by historian Nina Möllers.
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.
Wild rice was “tamed” when domesticated in the 1950s, yet both cultivated and foraged wild rice face shared contemporary challenges.
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.
Environmental building in Australia as a form of communing with nature.
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 this chapter of the virtual exhibition “Drought, Mud, Filth, and Flood: Water Crises in Australian Cities, 1880s–2010s,” the authors show the extent to which the people of Perth, Western Australia, have relied on the groundwater of the Swan Coastal Plain, and the implications of this reliance in a drying climate. In the context of private and public extraction of groundwater, the government in 2014 commenced a groundwater replenishment scheme to “recharge” the local aquifers with treated wastewater.
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.”