Common Purpose

The relationship between performance and curation has shift ed. A new attitude of fluid and pragmatic alliance has evolved as the sense of an essential antagonism between performance and curation recedes and the two fields discover a shared focus on aspects of social engagement and agency. This article considers an Australian socially engaged art project, the Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation (KSCA), which meshes curatorial and artistic practices in its efforts to reimagine and reanimate the future of a small country town. Employing a wide range of strategies, KSCA works closely with the local community to facilitate collective memory, reflection and social and environmental transformation. Deliberately avoiding traditional lines of artistic and institutional tension, KSCA employs an impure and inclusive approach that is emblematic of emerging forms of activist contemporary art.

The Desert Blossoms as a Rose. Toward a Western Conservation Aesthetic

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (aka The “Mormon” Church) offers what believers consider to be the restoration of an original Christianity. This essay explores the grounds for a Latter-day Saint restoration of a once-lost ecological wisdom that could make contemporary settlements in the American West more sustainable, especially where Latter-day Saints have established many communities. While Latter-day Saints and many other settlers of the West considered their work to be a kind of fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy to make the desert “blossom as a rose” through radical environmental transformation, this essay argues for a more aesthetic and ecologically sensitive response to the native qualities of the desert that need protection or even restoration.

Systematization and Classification of the European Union’s policy Instruments for the Implementation of the Green Dealсис

In 2019, the new European Commission (EC) presented its vision for climate and environmental transformation in Europe and beyond in its communication on the Green Deal. The Green Deal covers all sectors of the economy, elaborates a new concept for economic growth with climate goals at its centre, and implies a review of current EU climate and climate-related policies. An analysis of the instruments for the Green Deal’s implementation and internationalization and their classification and systematization shows a wider picture of the whole complex of available and suggested new policy tools. It also clarifies the role of each of the initiatives and assesses more precisely their importance and potential for influencing the global climate agenda and relations with the Russian Federation. The analysis further reveals the balance of costs and benefits for the sectors and actors involved. The purpose of this study is to systematize the complex of the Green Deal’s implementation instruments and assess the balance of various measures in the EU’s menu of policy options. The EU’s influence on the global agenda and the interests of other countries, including Russia, is not limited to the introduction of the carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM), which was widely covered and analyzed as a never before applied trade and climate policy tool with potential to influence global competition. Upcoming new rules to enter the European market, including through sustainable product requirements, could affect the interests of other countries even more. This influence will also be amplified by the regulatory frameworks and rules on emerging markets, such as for climate-neutral technologies and energy sources. Analysis of the initiatives suggests that the measures may be quite burdensome, especially for citizens, while the system of redistribution and compensation is not yet sufficiently developed in terms of financing and administration. Some initiatives significantly increase the transaction and administrative costs for all market participants (exporters, importers, European companies, and consumers) with fairly limited emissions reductions on a global scale. Despite these drawbacks, the Green Deal remains the most comprehensive, elaborate, detailed and ambitious initiative aimed at reaching the net-zero target. Other actors have their own reasoning for tougher climate policy, but the influence and pressure of the Deal increases the ambition of their goals and encourages them to consider the implementation of various policy options, including strict carbon regulation. Therefore, the new EU policy could become a model to identify the best solutions and practices, as well as a catalyst for global climate transition.

Diet of the little Athene noctua (Scopoli, 1769) on the territory of Berehovo district (Transcarpathian region)

Objectives. The Little Owl is the most common owl in the Western Palearctic and its population is declining significantly in Europe. Therefore, conservation and study of this owl is an important issue in most European countries. Analysis of trophic patterns at the local level provides interesting and valuable information about the predator’s eating habits. The owl’s diet investigation allows us to analyze their potential adaptations to habitats with different levels of environmental transformation. Materials and Methods. We studied nutrition of the Little Owl Athene noctua, in agricultural lands of Berehove district of Transcarpathian region in Ukraine. In total, 1446 pellets were collected at 15 pellet stations in 2002–2020 and 2506 prey items were identified. The prey items represented 18 vertebrate species (16 species of small mammals of three orders Rodentia, Soricomorpha, Carnivora, as well as reptiles of the family Lacertidae and birds of the order Passeriformes and arthropods. Results. Vertebrates play a major role in feeding the Little Owl (over 99 % of total prey biomass in all of the studied sites). The common vole is the most common prey in the owl’s diet (52.1 % of the total prey number and 67.5 % of the biomass of the prey caught), as well as a high proportion of mice of the genus Apodemus and Sylvaemus. The contribution of invertebrates to total prey biomass is insignificant (0.3 %). A large number of invertebrates were observed in the diet of the Owl in summer and were almost completely absent in winter. Conclusions. According to our data, the Little Owl is a typical predator generalist in Transcarpathia. The 28 taxa found in the pellets show a wide range of food objects in a relatively small area, and high level adaptations to habitats with different levels of environmental transformation (agrosystems and anthropogenic areas).

Affect, blankness, theatrics: Rurality and faciality in three Chinese instances

The face and the close-up have been central to film theory since its early days. If modern visual theories of the face arose in Europe amid urbanization and imperial encounter, in the People's Republic of China (PRC), the political aesthetics of faciality became central to Maoist mass mobilizations of the countryside, in part through collective village film screenings. Bringing together themes of faciality, rurality and anxieties of global encounter, this article considers how the rural has been staged through genres of the face in Chinese cinema and television. Through close readings of the Maoist era The Youth of Our Village, Jia Zhangke’s Still Life and Zhao Benshan Media’s series Rural Love Story, I consider three distinct deployments of the face in depictions of rural and environmental transformation. Thinking with while also departing from Deleuze’s formulations in Cinema 1 and Cinema 2, the article traces an emotively intense face reminiscent of the affection-image, a blank face that operates in part as a time-image and a performative face of what might be called a theatrics-image. Across its readings as a site of affective immediacy, despotic inscription, moral character and social–political manoeuvring, the face offers a multivalent site for political, aesthetic and affective mediation, on- and off-screen.

The Uruguay River: A Permeable Border in South America

The Uruguay River basin in South America has held a social, cultural, environmental, and economic relevance for many centuries. The river flows for about 2,000 km, linked to an important remnant of native forest, the Selva Misionera in Argentina, and to a Brazilian conservation unit for biodiversity, the Turvo State Park. The Uruguay River is fed by several other important rivers, forming a basin region in which thousands of people live and work. The history of the Uruguay River is intensively linked to the permeable borders between Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay where different social groups circulated in diverse historical time periods. Forests along the river played a very important role with emphasis on the extraction and trade of yerba mate (Ilex paraguariensis, Saint-Hilaire), a forest product widely consumed in southern America, and also the timber extraction from native forests, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As a result, a profound socio-environmental transformation took place with the reconstruction of regional landscapes shaped by the Uruguay River basin.

Techniques of repair, the circulation of knowledge, and environmental transformation: Towards a new history of transportation

It is the aim of this article to put questions of maintenance and repair in the history of science and technology under scrutiny, with a special focus on technologies and methods of transportation. The history of transportation is a history of trying to avoid shipwrecks and plane crashes. It is also a history of broken masts, worm-eaten hulls, the flat tires of cars, and endless delays at airports. This introductory article assesses the technological, scientific, and cultural implications of repairing and maintaining transportation networks. We argue that infrastructures for maintenance and repair played just as important a role in the history of transportation as the wharves and factories where ships, cars, trains, and airplanes were originally built. We also suggest that maintenance and repair are important sites of knowledge production, and a historical account of these practices provides a new, decentered narrative for the development of modern science and technology.

A Brief Review of the Structure, Cytotoxicity, Synthesis, and Biodegradation of Microcystins

Harmful cyanobacterial blooms pose an environmental health hazard due to the release of water-soluble cyanotoxins. One of the most prevalent cyanotoxins in nature is microcystins (MCs), a class of cyclic heptapeptide hepatotoxins, and they are produced by several common cyanobacteria in aquatic environments. Once released from cyanobacterial cells, MCs are subjected to physical chemical and biological transformations in natural environments. MCs can also be taken up and accumulated in aquatic organisms and their grazers/predators and induce toxic effects in several organisms, including humans. This brief review aimed to summarize our current understanding on the chemical structure, exposure pathway, cytotoxicity, biosynthesis, and environmental transformation of microcystins.