Nature and Culture

This article challenges the common presentation of the medieval street as a mud- and muck-filled cesspit. Using the television episode “Medieval London” of the Filthy Cities series aired by BBC Two in 2011 as a springboard, I discuss the realities of medieval waste management and modern conceptions of it. Through an examination of historical records from London, I show that the early fourteenth-century medieval street was not nearly as filthy as portrayed in Filthy Cities. Rather than being based on medieval evidence, our notion of the dirty medieval city is built on modern ideas of civility and scientific progress. Interpretations like that in Filthy Cities reflect more on our modern condition than the medieval one. The constructed dichotomy of medieval filth versus modern cleanliness obscures our contemporary waste problems and reinforces a physical and mental distance from our own waste.

This article investigates the messages about climate change that ten nature protection organizations in Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States communicate to their members and the public through their Internet sites, member magazines, and annual reports. Based on analysis of this content, we conclude that all the organizations address climate change, but to varying extents and in differing ways. All of the organizations note that climate change is a major problem, has a significant impact on nature, and should be addressed mainly via mitigation. With the partial exception of the Dutch groups, all also inform their members about domestic climate change politics. Other themes, including international dimensions of climate change, adaptation to climate change, consumer behavior, collaboration with and criticism of business, and efforts to pressure business or government received less emphasis overall. How much emphasis the organizations gave these themes was conditioned by their traditions, constituencies, national context, and international affiliations.

When Sweden was confronted with the idea of building a gas pipeline through the Baltic Sea, the Swedish government found itself in a paradoxical situation. Should it give in to strong foreign interests and abandon its proudly held line of environmental policy, or stick to its profile at the risk of earning a powerful adversary? This narrative analysis, building on the government's official narratives, explains how and why the self-proclaimed environmental guardian of the sea ended up having it both ways. By using strategies of depoliticization, polarization, and parallel storytelling, the Swedish government surrendered narrative power to its antagonist, alternated between incompatible views of its own political capability, and added a happy ending to the pipeline tragedy. These strategies enabled the government to make an environmentally controversial decision without losing prestige or abandoning its ethical profile regarding the Baltic Sea.

Identifying appropriate restoration goals has long posed a challenge in ecological restoration. The task becomes even more difficult in settings with diverse land use histories. After two decades of remediation, a former chemical weapons facility near Denver, Colorado, has become a national wildlife refuge. Restoration efforts have isolated contaminants and restored bison and native prairie, but the site's complex history invites a deeper consideration of reference conditions. This article presents data from a visitor survey and interviews with land managers and citizen groups to examine conceptions of historical fidelity at this site. Results indicate that visitors and land managers orient toward restoration that features a traditional reference condition. Citizen groups point to restoration of cultural features as the highest priorities. This research highlights disparities between constituencies and suggests that restoration work itself may shape values that inform visitors and affirm how a landscape ought to exist.

This article examines the various roles that indicators, as boundary objects, can play as a science-based evidence for policy processes. It presents two case studies from the EU-funded POINT project that analyzed the use and influence of two highly different types of indicators: composite indicators of sustainable development at the EU level and energy indicators in the UK. In both cases indicators failed as direct input to policy making, yet they generated various types of conceptual and political use and influence. The composite sustainable development indicators served as “framework indicators”, helping to advocate a specific vision of sustainable development, whereas the energy indicators produced various types of indirect influence, including through the process of indicator elaboration. Our case studies demonstrate the relatively limited importance of the characteristics and quality of indicators in determining the role of indicators, as compared with the crucial importance of “user factors” (characteristics of policy actors) and “policy factors” (policy context).