Nature and Culture

The German energy transition repeatedly faces harsh critiques questioning its economic and environmental merits. This article defends the energy transition and argues that Germany has chosen an economically efficient and particularly forceful approach to securing a sustainable energy supply. Though current expenditures are high, the long-term benefits of transforming the energy system to a renewables-based system are likely to outweigh present investment costs. Furthermore, support policies for renewables are not redundant-as some critics claim-but instead complement other policy instruments, such as the emissions trading scheme. This article also addresses the motives behind the discrediting attacks on the German energy policy regime. Defensive actions by beneficiaries of the former energy market structure are only to be expected, but the attacks from liberal economists are astonishingly fierce.

This article is concerned with the way in which indigenous place-based knowledge and understandings, in a time of global climate change, have the potential to challenge researchers to self-reflexively shift the focus of their research toward those technological and consumer practices that are the cultural context of our research. After reviewing some literature on the emergence of self-reflexivity in research, the authors offer two case studies from their respective environmental education and anthropological research with northern indigenous cultures that clarifies the nature of a self-reflexive turn in place-based climate research and education. The global interconnections between northern warming and consumer culture-and its relation to everexpanding technological systems-are considered by following the critical insights of place-based knowledge. We conclude by examining the possibility that relocalizing our research, teaching, and ways of living in consumer culture are central to a sustainable future, and if so, the knowledge and understandings of current place-based peoples will be vital to envisioning such a cultural transformation of our globalizing system.

This article presents an approach to mapping multivalent metaphors, that is, metaphors that imply competing values. It suggests that a metaphor's interpretative repertoire can usefully be structured in terms of worldviews derived from political philosophies. To illustrate this approach, the article analyzes how Wildnis (wild nature) is used to refer to the Zwischenstadt (hybrid peri-urban landscapes) in German language planning discourse. It thus makes a contribution toward interpreting and structuring this discourse. After outlining the methodological framework, the article presents certain elements of the interpretative repertoire of Wildnis by outlining selected liberal, Romantic, and conservative interpretations of this metaphor. It then interprets actual statements by urban and landscape planners and designers, reconstructing how they refer to various political interpretations of Wildnis. Finally, it is argued that the approach can benefit planning practice by enhancing frame awareness and by allowing for a systematic analysis of the metaphor's blind spots.

Full-length feature articles in eight popular American hunting magazines were assessed to better understand hunter-prey relationships as depicted in contemporary hunting discourse. Our findings suggest hunters regard prey using two contradictory paradigms-Love and Kill. In the Love category, we find respect for life, admiration for nature and animals, and a sense of kinship between hunter and prey. In contrast, writings consistent with the Kill theme focus on conquest, objectification, hunter physiological responses, and violence. Of the 23 articles reviewed, 61 percent of the sample had multiple representations of Love and Kill in the same article, revealing a multilayered discourse. Many scholars have written about Love and Kill as separate constructs in hunting, suggesting they are mutually exclusive. Our empirical study counters this claim, finding instead that individual hunters often view their prey through a mixed lens that includes both Love and Kill.

The question posed in this article is how shifts in governance ushered in by the sustainability paradigm are reshaping knowledge governance. Drawing on constructivist theories of knowledge, I examine the tension between the sustainability mandate to open up knowledge making to local knowledge, and conventional science policy practice that would see it excluded. I present a water management case study from New Zealand's South Island region of Canterbury, where communities are involved in establishing catchment nutrient limits to manage land use and water quality. It is concluded that although local knowledge was embraced within the knowledge-making process, the pursuit of epistemic authority led to its recalibration, aggregation, and standardization. As such, it was stripped of its complexity. This research highlights the role of politics in anchoring the linear knowledge governance model in place and the challenge for supplanting it.

Foster, John B., Brett Clark, and Richard York. 2010. The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Williams, Chris. 2010. Ecology and Socialism: Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.