scholarly journals Image, Environment, Infrastructure: The Social Ecologies of the Bergfilm

Humanities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 38
Author(s):  
Seth Peabody
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Change ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Infrastructure Development ◽  
Environmental Implications ◽  
Alpine Regions ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
The Alps ◽  
Film Aesthetics

The German mountain film (Bergfilm) has received extensive critical attention for its political, social, and aesthetic implications, but has received remarkably little attention for its role in the environmental history of the Alps. This article considers the Bergfilm within the long history of depictions of the Alps and the growth of Alpine tourism in order to ask how the role of media in environmental change shifts with the advent of film. The argument builds on Verena Winiwarter and Martin Knoll’s model of social-ecological interaction, Adrian Ivakhiv’s theoretical framework for the environmental implications of film, and Laura Frahm’s theories of filmic space. Through an analysis of Arnold Fanck’s films Der heilige Berg [The Holy Mountain, Fanck 1926] and Der große Sprung [The Great Leap, Fanck 1927], which are compared with Gustav Renker’s novel Heilige Berge [Holy Mountains, Renker 1921] and set into the context of the environmental history of the Alpine regions where the films were shot, the author argues that film aesthetics serve as a creative catalyst for environmental change and infrastructure development. While some ecocinema scholars have argued that environmental films teach viewers new ideas or change modes of behavior, this analysis suggests that film aesthetics are most effective at accelerating processes of environmental change that are already underway.

The Storm Lab: Meteorology in the Austrian Alps

2009 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 463-486 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah R. Coen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
High Altitude ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Early History ◽  
Austrian Alps ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Alps ◽  
Weather Stations ◽  
Definition Of

ArgumentWhat, if anything, uniquely defines the mountain as a “laboratory of nature”? Here, this question is considered from the perspective of meteorology. Mountains played a central role in the early history of modern meteorology. The first permanent year-round high-altitude weather stations were built in the 1880s but largely fell out of use by the turn of the twentieth century, not to be revived until the 1930s. This paper considers the unlikely survival of the Sonnblick observatory (3105 m.) in the Austrian Alps. By examining the arguments of the Sonnblick's critics and defenders, it reveals a seemingly paradoxical definition of the mountain as a space that simultaneously maximized isolation and communication. Drawing on the social and environmental history of the Alps, it shows how the Sonnblick came to appear as the perfect embodiment of this paradox.

scholarly journals Dialektik der Erschließung: The German–Austrian Alps between Exploration and Exploitation

Humanities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 17
Author(s):  
Sean Ireton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
Human Interaction ◽  
Exploration And Exploitation ◽  
Nördliche Kalkalpen ◽  
Austrian Alps ◽  
Limestone Alps ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Alps

Focusing on the so-called Nördliche Kalkalpen or Northern Limestone Alps of Germany and Austria, I will discuss how human interaction with these mountains during the age of the Anthropocene shifts from scientific and athletic exploration to commercial and industrial exploitation. More specifically, I will examine travel narratives by the nineteenth-century mountaineers Friedrich Simony and Hermann von Barth, juxtaposing their respective experiences in diverse Alpine subranges with the environmental history of those regions. This juxtaposition harbors a deeper paradox, one that can be formulated as follows: Whereas Simony and Barth both rank as historically important Erschließer of the German and Austrian Alps, having explored their crags and glaciers in search of somatic adventure and geoscientific knowledge, these very sites of rock and ice were about to become so erschlossen by modernized tourism that one wonders where the precise boundaries between individual-based discovery and technology-driven development lie. In other words, during the nineteenth century a kind of Dialektik der Erschließung (a variation on Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialektik der Aufklärung) manifests itself in the increasing anthropogenic alteration of the Alps.

History and the Militarized Landscape

2018 ◽  
pp. 162-184
Author(s):  
David Biggs
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Environmental Processes ◽  
Central Vietnam ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Global Discourse ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

The environmental history of war, especially its impacts on landscape, encompasses a much broader scope than the conflicts and the historiography of the late twentieth century. Ideas on the social and environmental processes of conflict draw from a much longer, global discourse. This chapter uses the ancient-to-modern conflict landscape of central Vietnam to argue for a multi-layered, broader analysis of the environmental history of conflict.

The environmental history of Australian rivers: a neglected field of opportunity?

2020 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul I. Boon
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Change ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Historical Ecology ◽  
Numerical Data ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Capital Cities ◽  
Perceptions And Attitudes ◽  
Alternative Approach ◽  
Australian Community ◽  
History Of

Historical ecology documents environmental change with scientific precepts, commonly by using statistical analyses of numerical data to test specific hypotheses. It is usually undertaken by ecologists. An alternative approach to understanding the natural world, undertaken instead by historians, geographers, sociologists, resource economists or literary critics, is environmental history. It attempts to explain in cultural terms why and how environmental change takes place. This essay outlines 10 case studies that show how rivers have affected perceptions and attitudes of the Australian community over the past 200+ years. They examine the influence at two contrasting scales, namely, the collective and the personal, by investigating the role that rivers had in the colonisation of Australia by the British in 1788, the establishment of capital cities, perceptions of and attitudes to the environment informed by explorers’ accounts of their journeys through inland Australia, the push for closer settlement by harnessing the country’s rivers for navigation and irrigation, anxiety about defence and national security, and the solastalgia occasioned by chronic environmental degradation. Historical ecology and environmental history are complementary intellectual approaches, and increased collaboration across the two disciplines should yield many benefits to historians, to ecologists, and to the conservation of Australian rivers more widely.

The World the Bedouin Lived in: Climate, Migration and Politics in the Early Modern Arab East

2015 ◽  
Vol 58 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 21-55
Author(s):  
Astrid Meier ◽  
Tariq Tell
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Societal Level ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Marginal Zones

Environmental history provides a perspective from which we can deepen our understanding of the past because it examines the relationships of people with their material surroundings and the effects of those relationships on the individual as well as the societal level. It is a perspective that holds particular promise for the social and political history of arid and marginal zones, as it contributes to our understanding of the reason some groups are more successful than others in coping with the same environmental stresses. Historians working on the early modern Arab East have only recently engaged with the lively field of global environmental history. After presenting a brief overview of some strands of this research, this article illustrates the potential of this approach by looking closely at a series of conflicts involving Bedouin and other power groups in the southern parts of Bilād al-Shām around the middle of the eighteenth century.

The Mesolithic site Ullafelsen in the Fotsch Valley (Tyrol, Austria) – a biomarker perspective

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Zech ◽  
Marcel Lerch ◽  
Marcel Bliedtner ◽  
Clemens Geitner ◽  
Dieter Schäfer ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Environmental History ◽  
Analytical Data ◽  
Late Glacial ◽  
Swiss Alps ◽  
Peat Bogs ◽  
High Mountain ◽  
Hunter Gatherers ◽  
Alpine Regions ◽  
Bavarian Alps ◽  
History Of

<p>The archaeology of high mountain regions got high attention since the discovery of the copper age mummy called "Ötzi" in the Ötztaler Alps in 1991. Results of former archaeological research projects show that mesolithic hunter-gatherers lived in Alpine regions since the beginning of the Holocene, 11,700 years ago (Cornelissen & Reitmaier 2016). Amongst others, the Mesolithic site Ullafelsen (1860 m a.s.l.) and surroundings represent a very important archaeological reference site in the Fotsch Valley (Stubaier Alps, Tyrol) (Schäfer 2011). Many archaeological artifacts and fire places were found at different places in the Fotschertal, which provides evidence for the presence and the way of living of our ancestor. The "Mesolithic project Ullafelsen" includes different scientific disciplines ranging from high mountain archaeology over geology, geomorphology, soil science, sedimentology, petrography to palaeobotany (Schäfer 2011). Within an ongoing DFG project we aim at addressing questions related to past vegetation and climate, human history as well as their influence on pedogenesis from a biomarker and stable isotope perspective (cf. Zech et al. 2011). Our results for instance suggest that (i) the dominant recent and past vegetation can be chemotaxonomically differentiated based on leaf wax-derived <em>n</em>-alkane biomarkers, (ii) there is no evidence for buried Late Glacial topsoils being preserved on the Ullafelsen as argued by Geitner et al. (2014), rather humic-rich subsoils were formed as B<sub>h</sub>-horizons by podsolisation and (iii) marked vegetations changes likely associated with alpine pasture activities since the Bronce Age are documented in Holocene peat bogs in the Fotsch Valley. Nevertheless, there remain some challenges by joining all analytical data in order to get a consistent overall picture of human-environmental history of this high mountain region.</p><p>Cornelissen & Reitmaier (2016): Filling the gap: Recent Mesolithic discoveries in the central and south-eastern Swiss Alps. In: Quaternary International, 423.</p><p>Geitner, C., Schäfer, D., Bertola, S., Bussemer, S., Heinrich, K. und J. Waroszewski (2014): Landscape archaeological results and discussion of Mesolithic research in the Fotsch valley (Tyrol). In: Kerschner, H., Krainer, K. and C. Spötl: From the foreland to the Central Alps – Field trips to selected sites of Quaternary research in the Tyrolean and Bavarian Alps (DEUQUA EXCURSIONS), Berlin, 106-115.</p><p>Schäfer (2011): Das Mesolithikum-Projekt Ullafelsen (Teil 1). Mensch und Umwelt im Holozän Tirols (Band 1). 560 p., Innsbruck: Philipp von Zabern.</p><p>Zech, M., Zech, R., Buggle, B., Zöller, L. (2011): Novel methodological approaches in loess research - interrogating biomarkers and compound-specific stable isotopes. In: E&G Quaternary Science Journal, 60.</p>

The Environmental Fall of the Roman Empire

Daedalus ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 145 (2) ◽  
pp. 101-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kyle Harper
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Environmental Change ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Environmental Variability ◽  
Ice Cores ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
History Of ◽  
Health And Disease ◽  
Climate Proxies

Global environmental history is currently being enriched by troves of new data, and new models of environmental variability and human impact. Earth scientists are rapidly expanding historians’ knowledge of the paleoclimate through the recovery and analysis of climate proxies such as ice cores, tree rings, stalagmites, and marine and lake sediments. Further, archaeologists and anthropologists are using novel techniques and methods to study the history of health and disease, as revealed through examination of bones and paleomolecular evidence. These possibilities open the way for historians to participate in a conversation about the long history of environmental change and human response. This essay considers how one of the most classic of all historical questions–the fall of the Roman Empire–can receive an answer enriched by new knowledge about the role of environmental change.

Social and Environmental History in the Anthropocene

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Warde
Keyword(s):  
Environmental History ◽  
Social History ◽  
Human Activities ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Longue Duree ◽  
Longue Durée

This chapter takes seriously the notion of the ‘Anthropocene’—the concept of the period of history from which human activities have had global effects on the environment—and looks at it historically, across the longue durée, noting that the environment is itself a concept with a history of its own. The chapter argues that environmental history is very largely entwined with social history and that this poses a challenge for historians. Should we think of ‘the social’ and ‘the environmental’ as two different (albeit connected) spheres, or should we reconceptualize what ‘society’ and ‘environment’ might mean, both historically and for the future?

Environmental History

Rural History ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Merricks
Keyword(s):  
Environmental History ◽  
Historical Ecology ◽  
Cultural Knowledge ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Present Decade ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Second World

A cursory examination of publishers’ catalogues reveals a number of titles like Environmental History, Green History and An Environmental History of Britain which suggest an upsurge of interest in what has come to be called ‘environmental history’. This weight of scholarship suggests that demands for the ‘greening of history’, or for more studies of the impact of human actions on the countryside, which have been made throughout the present decade, have been answered. It is worth noting the shift of title from ‘Green’ to ‘Environmental’. ‘Green’ is increasingly attached to the political movements and social groups concerned with environmental issues and even, in the case of the German Greens, to political parties whose concerns include ecology as only one of a number of interests. ‘Environmental’ has a much broader range, but, as the titles below demonstrate, this is by no means an absolute distinction. Closer consideration of many of these works reveals that although ‘History’ appears in many titles, the books are actually written by archaeologists, by sociologists, by political theorists, by Green activists and, most frequently, by geographers - all with ‘historical’ appended to their discipline. The Social Construction of the Past is a collection of essays from the Second World Archaeological Conference; Environmentalism proves to be ‘the view from Anthropology’ but contains at least one essay which appears to be a model of what environmental history could be. Historical Ecology: Cultural Knowledge and Changing Landscapes, rather confusingly, has chapters on historical transformations and a discussion of the ‘history’ in historical ecology. This is perhaps not surprising. History has always prided itself on interdisciplinarity and on its universal appeal. The usual justifications for undergraduate history begin from the premise that a knowledge of one's own history is necessary for any understanding of society, and that history has so many variations that there is bound to be some congenial corner for anyone interested in the past. What is still lacking, however, is British environmental history, written by historians.

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