This exhibition shows some of the many links between the Neva River in St. Petersburg and the Viennese Danube discovered during the joint Russian-Austrian research project “The Long-Term Dynamics of Fish Populations and Ecosystems of European Rivers.”

In this chapter from the virtual exhibition “Global Environments: A 360º Visual Journey,” Jesse Peterson’s 360° video presents both an environment and posthuman character from which the human cannot be disentangled, in the context of cultural eutrophication fueled by anthropogenic sources of pollution and climate change affecting the marine environment.

“‘Commanding, sovereign stream’: The Neva and the Viennese Danube in the History of Imperial Metropolitan Centers” was created by Gertrud Haidvogl, Alexei Kraikovski, and Julia Lajus (2019) under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. This refers only to the text and does not include image rights. Please click on an image to view its individual rights status. Thumbnails of the following images appear on the exhibition landing page:

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 similarities and differences in the history of water supply, pollution, and waste management in St. Petersburg and Vienna.

In this chapter of her virtual exhibition “Human-Nature Relations in German Literature,” Sabine Wilke shows how topics of pollution and waste in German-language writing reach back to the nineteenth century, when the production of industrial waste—and pollution of the air, ground, and water—first began to occur on a massive scale. For the German-language version of this exhibition, click here.