ARTlines: three walking artists in Iceland

Author(s):  
Patti Lean

Artist Patti Lean gives an account in this chapter of a walking and camping tour of Iceland in the company of two other artists. The three artists, in sharing the experience of close contact with the sublime landscape of the island, each responded in their own way to produce art work. Lean’s art practice focussed on this compelling landscape, but all three artists also engaged with the rich Icelandic culture and the chapter includes discussion of writer Halldór Laxness, film maker Benedikt Erlingsson and artist Louisa Matthíasdóttir. The challenge for Lean is to reconcile her training in Art History and the associated narrative of the sublime, with the environmental concerns that she met during this tour, for example the failure of breeding for arctic terns as climate change has left too little food in the surrounding sea.

Author(s):  
J. R. McNeill

This chapter discusses the emergence of environmental history, which developed in the context of the environmental concerns that began in the 1960s with worries about local industrial pollution, but which has since evolved into a full-scale global crisis of climate change. Environmental history is ‘the history of the relationship between human societies and the rest of nature’. It includes three chief areas of inquiry: the study of material environmental history, political and policy-related environmental history, and a form of environmental history which concerns what humans have thought, believed, written, and more rarely, painted, sculpted, sung, or danced that deals with the relationship between society and nature. Since 1980, environmental history has come to flourish in many corners of the world, and scholars everywhere have found models, approaches, and perspectives rather different from those developed for the US context.


2021 ◽  
Vol 95 (4) ◽  
pp. 823-840
Author(s):  
Robert J. Gordon

Gather a group of economists together and ask what most concerns them, and a wide variety of topics would soon emerge: slowing economic growth in the rich nations, the inability of many poor nations to converge toward the rich, rising income and wealth inequality, the increasing dominance of superstar firms, growing profit margins and the decline in labor's income share, globalization and the human costs of outsourcing, deaths of despair, and the threat of climate change. Decade after decade, numerous books have been written about each of these issues. But here we have in one compact package a blockbuster book that deals with all of them.


2010 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 629-639 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lindsay F. Wiley

In coming decades, enhanced global health governance will be crucial to achieving international health and development objectives in the face of a number of challenges; this article focuses on one of them. Climate change, which is now widely recognized as the defining challenge of the 21st century, will make the work of ensuring the conditions in which people can be healthy more difficult in a myriad of ways. Scientists from both the health and climate communities have been highlighting the significant interaction between climate and health for decades and have made significant strides in integrating health and environmental research. Those of us in the law and policy community have been a bit slow to catch up, and have only just begun to call for better integration of our responses to health and environmental concerns. Environmental health specialists at the World Health Organization have recently pointed to a mandate for better integration of health and environmental concerns within the United Nations system. The Millennium Development Goals interweave health, environmental, and development concerns.


2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 152-161 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graeme Webb

AbstractWe are in the depths of multiple catastrophes that Western society is seemingly unwilling and unable to address: growing inequalities between the rich and the poor, a willful blindness to climate change, and a political system mired in uncompromising and ever increasing extremism. However, there are no reality transcending dialogues, no new social imaginaries to drive change—our own dystopic reality has no utopian response. The greatest importance that the Occupy movements may play in spurring social change and revolution is their success at bringing radical discourses into mainstream society. Occupy not only occupied fixed public locations, but also occupied our social imagination.


2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 127
Author(s):  
Jan-Erik Lane

The new theme of abrupt climate change (“Hawking tipping point”) must be taken up by global coordination – the UNFCCC, IPCC and the G20. The only policy response is to reinforce the COP21 project, and start managing its quick implementation of decarbonisation. A more decisive climate change policy – no coal or charcoal, solar power parks, and possibly carbon capture – may not guarantee the goal of + 2 degrees Celsius, but it may help avoid climate chaos. Only global coordination can break through the resistance of markets in the rich countries and governments in the Third World together with vibrant civil society. The large COP21 Secretariat must become a management agency for rapid decarbonisation with support from other global bodies (WB, IMF) and the G20.


Author(s):  
John Reader

Environmental concerns about the state of the world’s oceans have been growing over recent years, particularly as acidification, overfishing and the limited capacity of the oceans to absorb CO2 from climate change have come to the fore. Engineering practices and innovations in a number of forms are of direct relevance to this, notably through a concern to develop engineering in such a way as to be for the benefit of all, including the non-human world. This article argues that assemblage theory offers an alternative way of understanding how culture is always already a part of nature, and that human autonomy has to be seen as constrained and limited if the worst effects of pollution and climate change are to be addressed.


Leonardo ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 124-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriella Giannachi

Over the last quarter-century, an increasing number of artists have been variously engaging the public in artworks addressing the anthropogenic phenomenon known as climate change. Focusing specifically on works developed in the fields of visual arts, performance and new media, and on a body of theory attempting to distinguish between terms such as nature, landscape, weather, climate and environment, this article aims to offer an exploration of how these works, by adopting, often concurrently, three strategies—representation, performance and mitigation—affect our understanding of our changing relationship to nature and climate.


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