The idea of the earth as a vessel in space came of age in an era shaped by space travel and the Cold War. Höhler’s study brings together technology, science and ecology to explore the way this latter-day ark was invoked by politicians, environmentalists, cultural historians, writers of science fiction and many others across three decades.
How climate influenced the design strategies of modernist architects Modern Architecture and Climate explores how leading architects of the twentieth century incorporated climate-mediating strategies into their designs, and shows how regional approaches to climate adaptability were essential to the development of modern architecture. Focusing on the period surrounding World War II—before fossil-fuel powered air-conditioning became widely available—Daniel Barber brings to light a vibrant and dynamic architectural discussion involving design, materials, and shading systems as means of interior climate control. He looks at projects by well-known architects such as Richard Neutra, Le Corbusier, Lúcio Costa, Mies van der Rohe, and Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, and the work of climate-focused architects such as MMM Roberto, Olgyay and Olgyay, and Cliff May. Drawing on the editorial projects of James Marston Fitch, Elizabeth Gordon, and others, he demonstrates how images and diagrams produced by architects helped conceptualize climate knowledge, alongside the work of meteorologists, physicists, engineers, and social scientists. Barber describes how this novel type of environmental media catalyzed new ways of thinking about climate and architectural design. Extensively illustrated with archival material, Modern Architecture and Climate provides global perspectives on modern architecture and its evolving relationship with a changing climate, showcasing designs from Latin America, Europe, the United States, the Middle East, and Africa. This timely and important book reconciles the cultural dynamism of architecture with the material realities of ever-increasing carbon emissions from the mechanical cooling systems of buildings and offers a historical foundation for today’s zero-carbon design.
During the 1960s and 1970s, rapidly growing environmental awareness and concern created unprecedented demand for ecological expertise and novel challenges for ecological advocacy groups such as the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN). This book reveals how, despite their vast scientific knowledge and their attempts to incorporate socially relevant themes, IUCN experts inevitably struggled to make global schemes for nature conservation a central concern for UNESCO, UNEP and other intergovernmental organizations.
The untold history of how people came to conceive, to manage, and to dispute environmental crisis, The Environment is essential reading for anyone who wants to help protect the environment from the numerous threats it faces today.
The Stockholm Conference of 1972 drew the world’s attention to the global environmental crisis, but for people in Sweden the threat was nothing new. Anyone who read the papers or watched the television news was already familiar with the issues. Five years early, in the summer of 1967, the situation was very different. So what happened in between? This book explores the ‘environmental turn’ that took place in Sweden in the late-1960s. This radical change, the realisation that human beings were in the process of destroying their own environment, had major and far-reaching consequences. What was it that opened people’s eyes to the crisis? When did it happen? Who set the ball rolling? These are some of the questions the book addresses, shedding new light on the history of environmentalism.
This edited volume interrogates the role of media technologies in the formation of environments, understood both as physical spaces and as epistemological constructs about them. Using the concept of ‘environing media’, the book advances a deeper understanding of how media processes – defined here as the storage, process, and transmission of data – influence human-Earth relations. Virtually all aspects of the interconnected global ecological crisis can be related to the intensification and acceleration of scaling up the human imprint on the planet by technological means. Combining ideas from the humanities, arts, and humanistic social sciences, Environing Media offers a perspective on how we entered the current geological epoch – the Anthropocene. The ten chapters explore colonial, planetary, and elemental environing media, with cases including indigenous history, ocean monitoring, computational history, climate modeling, environmental history, the air as medium, the biosphere, and the Earth system. Drawing upon a breadth of examples and expertise in history, anthropology, geography, cultural history, science and technology studies, and media studies, the book discovers a novel approach to human-Earth histories that demonstrates how technologies have mediated between humans and environments and in the process contributed to a societal feedback loop between knowing and doing environment, each impacting the other. Environing Media is a timely addition for scholars and upper-level students in environmental humanities and media studies. The Open Access version of chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, and 9 are available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003282891. Chapters 1, 2, 4, 5, and 7 have been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license. Chapters 3, 8, and 9 have been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY 4.0) license.
In the wake of the Second World War, internationalists identified science as both the cause of and the solution to world crisis. Unless civilization learned to control the unprecedented powers science had unleashed, global catastrophe was imminent. But the internationalists found hope in the idea of world government. In The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment, Perrin Selcer argues that the metaphor of “Spaceship Earth”—the idea of the planet as a single interconnected system—exemplifies this moment, when a mix of anxiety and hope inspired visions of world community and the proliferation of international institutions. Selcer tells the story of how the United Nations built the international knowledge infrastructure that made the global-scale environment visible. Experts affiliated with UN agencies helped make the “global”—as in global population, global climate, and global economy—an object in need of governance. Selcer traces how UN programs such as UNESCO’s Arid Lands Project, the production of a soil map of the world, and plans for a global environmental-monitoring system fell short of utopian ambitions to cultivate world citizens but did produce an international community of experts with influential connections to national governments. He shows how events and personalities, cultures and ecologies, bureaucracies and ideologies, decolonization and the Cold War interacted to make global knowledge. A major contribution to global history, environmental history, and the history of development, this book relocates the origins of planetary environmentalism in the postwar politics of scale.
This book considers the provisional nature of cities in relation to the Anthropocene – the proposed geological epoch of human-induced changes to the Earth system. It charts an environmental history of curfews, admonitions and alarms about dwelling on Earth. ‘Provisional cities’ are explored as exemplary sites for thinking about living in this unsettled time. Each chapter focuses on cities, settlements or proxy urbanisations, including past disaster zones, remote outposts in the present and future urban fossils. The book explores the dynamic, changing and contradictory relationship between architecture and the global environmental crisis and looks at how to re-position architectural and urban practice in relation to wider intellectual, environmental, political and cultural shifts. The book argues that these rounder and richer accounts can better equip humanity to think through questions of vulnerability, responsibility and opportunity that are presented by immense processes of planetary change. These are cautionary tales for the Anthropocene. Central to this project is the proposition that living with uncertainty requires that architecture is reframed as a provisional practice. This book would be beneficial to students and academics working in architecture, geography, planning and environmental humanities as well as professionals working to shape the future of cities.
How technological advances and colonial fears inspired utopian geoengineering projects during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries From the 1870s to the mid-twentieth century, European explorers, climatologists, colonial officials, and planners were avidly interested in large-scale projects that might actively alter the climate. Uncovering this history, Desert Edens looks at how arid environments and an increasing anxiety about climate in the colonial world shaped this upsurge in ideas about climate engineering. From notions about the transformation of deserts into forests to Nazi plans to influence the climates of war-torn areas, Philipp Lehmann puts the early climate change debate in its environmental, intellectual, and political context, and considers the ways this legacy reverberates in the present climate crisis. Lehmann examines some of the most ambitious climate-engineering projects to emerge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Confronted with the Sahara in the 1870s, the French developed concepts for a flooding project that would lead to the creation of a man-made Sahara Sea. In the 1920s, German architect Herman Sörgel proposed damming the Mediterranean in order to geoengineer an Afro-European continent called “Atlantropa,” which would fit the needs of European settlers. Nazi designs were formulated to counteract the desertification of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Despite ideological and technical differences, these projects all incorporated and developed climate change theories and vocabulary. They also combined expressions of an extreme environmental pessimism with a powerful technological optimism that continue to shape the contemporary moment. Focusing on the intellectual roots, intended effects, and impact of early measures to modify the climate, Desert Edens investigates how the technological imagination can be inspired by pressing fears about the environment and civilization.
Shaping Tomorrow’s World tells the crucial story of how futures studies developed in West Germany, Europe, the US and within global futures networks from the 1940s to the 1980s. It charts the emergence of different approaches and thought styles within the field ranging from Cold War defense intellectuals such as Herman Kahn to critical peace activists like Robert Jungk. Engaging with the challenges of the looming nuclear war, the changing phases of the Cold War, ‘1968’, and the growing importance of both the Global South and environmentalism, this book argues that futures scholars actively contributed to these processes of change. This multiple award-winning study combines national and transnational perspectives to present a unique history of envisioning, forecasting, and shaping the future.
