Activist as Symptom: Healing Trauma within a Ruptured Collective

Animal activists serve as symptom-bearers for trans-species collective trauma within Western-industrial society. Findings from literature on traumatology and nonhuman animal activism, contemporary discourse, and the voices of ten activists currently in the field suggest that many animal activists suffer some form of trauma. Activist trauma arises through overlapping, complex relational processes of intersubjective attunement with nonhuman animals and embeddedness within a human social context that disavows nonhuman suffering. In understanding activist trauma as a symptom of a dysfunctional system, I depathologize activist suffering and view activists as integral members of a whole society that seeks healing.

A Different Story in the Anthropocene: Brazil’s Post-Colonial Quest for Oil (1930–1975)*

This article aims to identify new historical causes for the making of the Anthropocene (the rise of humans to a geological force) by addressing Brazil’s transformation into an oil producer and an oil-dependent country between 1930 and 1975. This example allows an escape from the essentialist explanation of the Anthropocene as the result of humans’ insatiable appetite for consumption, commonly rooted in an analysis of Western industrial society, and to focus instead on the notion of freedom in a former colony. Indeed, in the context of nation-building and modernization debates, petroleum appeared to many Brazilians as an opportunity to emancipate the country from its peripheral role as global raw material provider. The rise of petroleum gave a post-colonial sense to the nation-founding myth of Brazil’s exceptional nature, which served as romantic background for a movement towards resource sovereignty embedded into a global anti-imperialist context. In Brazil specifically, oil production became an opportunity for a process of ecological transformation that promised to rid the country of colonial landscapes of exploitation, and even appeared as a solution for stopping the unsustainable destruction of tropical forests. Ultimately, these petro-ideals of emancipation, by positively linking nature and the nation, also hindered fully detecting the scope of the pollution problems that oil was generating. As argued in the article’s conclusion, this example should rekindle the discussion about the unintended link between freedom and geological change in the analysis of Anthropocene causalities.

Toward a Population Revolution? The Threat of Extinction and Family Policy in Czechoslovakia 1930s–1950s

The 1930s and 1940s were a formative period in the development of family policy as a relatively independent branch of the state’s social policy in the Bohemian lands. During this time, several political regimes followed one another (liberal democracy, a conservative authoritative regime, the national socialism of the occupation, and postwar people’s democracy). Despite these political changes, family policy was determined by the discourse of the waning Western industrial society and intensifying nationalism throughout the period in question. The articulation of the national threat created the conditions necessary for active state intervention in the sphere of marital cohabitation and managed support of population growth. This entailed compensating families for preserving the nation as a whole by giving birth to a populous new generation. These efforts were often in conflict with the movement for equality among men and women and increased women’s participation in the labor market. The first part of this article describes the discourse of the nation under threat and its political consequences. The second half focuses on the formation of the social reform consensus during the Second World War and after peace was restored. The third part confronts experts’ proposals with political practice: despite the low number of positive legislative measures, this analysis reveals the evident continuity of efforts to create a conceptual, state-led family policy regardless of the vastly different ideologies of the political regimes mentioned.

CONSERVATION, DEVELOPMENT AND ENVIRONMENTALISM: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE AND FUTURE IMPERATIVES

Throughout history the city and the wilderness have been both idea and environment for urban man. The conflict between them is expressed in the earliest mythology and manifest today in the conservation versus development debate. The conflict is misdirected: conservation and development are interdependent. They are the same process on different time scales: the sustainance and security of life on earth. Their reconciliation is proposed in the concept of sustainable development.The widespread concern about the environment in the industrialised, developed societies today combines scientific and emotional components. The scientific component is a new and valuable appreciation of, and commitment to, the global ecology. The emotional component is more an anti-technology mood, an historically cyclic phenomenon of complex origins. Modern environmentalism is a complex amalgamation of those environmental concerns with wide ranging socio-economic and political reforms. Those reforms frequently involve the concept of no-growth or very limited economic growth, especially in Western industrial society, and derive from a pessimistic world view historically common among intellectuals. It is environmentalism, not conservationism, which is in conflict with the concept of development.A successful petroleum industry is vital to Australia's future security and welfare. The main threat to the industry comes from environmentalism, and the confusing myriad of legislation and regulation it has sponsored. Of particular significance is the policy of excluding exploration from conservation areas, rather than adopting a multiple and sequential land use approach. The single-usage approach to land management is inefficient balancing of resources and, correspondingly, is poor conservation practice. Multiple land use is a fundamental tenet of the sustainable development and the National Conservation Strategy of Australia.APEA, and business and industry generally, must improve communications with the public. The significance of primary resources in the daily life and national economy must be retaught. Industry must play a leading role in defining and implementing sustainable development, and in championing the concept. The concept will be attacked and manipulated by no-growth environmentalists, but they must not be allowed to prevail.Sustainable development offers the present generations the chance to reconcile conservation and development. That reconciliation is an imperative for the future.