Planetary Crisis Research Articles

Norwegian Youths’ Reflections on Education for Just Sustainable Futures

While education is often seen as a main strategy for enabling sustainable futures, youth question the ability of modern schooling to provide them with the necessary tools to mitigate our current planetary crises. In this paper, we argue for the need for more critical insight into how youth understand and envision sustainability. The paper is based on a pedagogical intervention study, with a design inspired by decolonial pedagogy (Pashby & Sund, 2019, p. 38). Data was collected in two interconnected workshops at three Norwegian upper secondary schools. We share reflections communicated by students in conversations during the workshops. The material shows that although the students display criticality and an acknowledgement of the need for alternative ways of thinking, they also express a frustration over not being provided with the necessary tools to express this critique through their current education. We argue that if sustainability is to provide an educational avenue of hope and change, it requires tools that can help students challenge the limitations of modern-colonial habits of being and knowing. As the students suggest themselves, there is also a need for making space for more creative and imaginative pedagogical practices in education.

A New Ontology and Youth Work Ethics in a Time of Planetary Crisis

ABSTRACT Evidence of the far-reaching impact of the Anthropocene on young people presents youth work with opportunities to reflect on some long-standing issues. This pioneering exercise considers the implications for youth work practice and its ethical frameworks should it embrace the tenets of the ‘new materialism’. We ask how youth work practice is currently understood, especially in ‘British-influenced youth work’ and whether there are problems with its conceptual, ethical and practice frameworks. We offer an account of ‘new materialism’ then consider the implications for the ethics of youth work practice if practitioners were to adopt this ontological perspective. Conceptually youth work would have a more relational orientation and rely less on essentialist universalised categories like ‘child’, ‘adolescent’ and ‘adult’. It would jettison developmentalist narratives and the structure-agency impasse by elaborating new accounts of assemblages-contingency. Adopting this approach also entails an ethic of cultivation grounded in care for the world. Such an ethic would entail situational judgements about how to enact care in a world in which unexpected changes periodically emerge. This bears a close relationship to ‘phronetic practice’.

Notes from the Editors, March 2024

buy this issuePaul Burkett's death on January 7, 2024, at age 67, means that the world is suddenly bereft of the figure who played the leading role over the last three decades in developing a Marxist ecological economics in the face of the growing planetary crisis. His loss leaves ecological Marxism without its foremost exponent of the ecological critique of capitalist value relations. It also means the loss of a warm and compassionate human being, and a beloved jazz musician.

MAKING THE CASE FOR THE HUMANITIES’ TAKE ON THE CRUCIAL ISSUE OF ECOLOGICAL CRISIS

For a large number of people, the Humanities and the question of environment may sound like an oxymoron. Indeed, a lot of people tend to associate what is environmental with science only. This paper seeks to counterargue this dominant, superficial, and evidently erroneous view. Therefore, not only do we argue for the presence of a logical connection between humanities and the issue of environment, but we also argue for the importance and the value of human sciences in addressing a man-made planetary crisis. In parallel, we consider that scientificity of the approach to the question is not and cannot be the only criterion nor the only requirement for tackling environmental issues. In fact, we believe that it is quite possible to make a case for the role and the efficacy of humanities in this area. In other words, this paper is making the case for the humanities’ take on a crucial issue. However, some people may wonder: How so?! How may the humanities be of utility? Do the humanities have what it takes to solve global environmental problems? Well, this paper answers all of these questions and more. Actually, the current article highlights the generous toolkit of valuable options offered by the classical humanities, the environmental humanities, together with the emergent tracks in humanities, and the way in which those tools may help in facing ecological threats.

Integration of satellite surveillance and metagenomics for the monitoring and protection of water basins from oil spills

The planetary crisis regarding water resources means that new methods are needed to monitor large areas of water basins that are threatened by chemical and natural pollutants, together with climate change. With the aim to detect oil spill, we applied an algorithm, which could consistently and reliably confirm the presence of oil in four polluted lake waters analyzed. Combined algorithm application and metagenomic analysis from the spill areas that had been detected by the satellite identified drivers of the microbial response to oil pollution. Based on ortholog abundances, metabolic pathway reconstruction carried out in PICRUSt2 highlighted the degradative capacity of these microorganism. These microorganisms could be suitable candidates for treatment of crude oil, aromatic hydrocarbons and the desulfurization of persistent petroleum substances like dibenzothiophene.Environmental changes have been analysed with the combination of satellite monitoring and metagenomic in other studies. Red snow phenomenon, in Franz Josef Land's Arctic observed by satellite, is the result of a microbial succession dominated by Chlamydomonas nivalis, a unicellular, red-colored photosynthetic green algae. Similarly, satellite monitoring and metagenomic monitoring were used to assess the impact on coral reefs of a huge quantity of mud spill from iron ore mining on the Abrolhos Bank reef in Brazil.In our study, the combination of satellite sensing and metagenomics analyses offer useful tools for the real-time monitoring of water bodies threatened by oil spills, as well as for the design of recovery strategies based on the use of valuable hydrocarbonoclastic microorganisms.

Shapley-Shubik Agents Within Superstructure-Based Recycling Model: Circular Economy Approaches for Fish Waste Eco-Industrial Park

The tremendous production of fish has resulted in an increased fish waste generation, which ultimately led to the current triple planetary crises on climate, biodiversity, and pollution. In this study, a Fish Waste-based Eco-Industrial Park (FWEIP) model is developed in an attempt to convert the linear economy in existing fish waste management into a circular economy model. Process Graph (P-graph) is used for combinatorial optimization to synthesize optimal FWEIP with the consideration of economic and environmental aspects. The model favors the production of biofuel using the gasification process (Rank 1) with a promising economic benefit of $2.28 million/y without proposing circular synergy within the FWEIP ecosystem. On the other hand, suboptimal solutions—suboptimal 1 (black soldier fly (BSF)) and suboptimal 2 (pyrolysis and gasification) solutions—exhibit gross profit of 17.98% and 24.12% lower than that of the optimal solution. Both suboptimal solutions offer greater circularity with self-sustaining resources (e.g., fish feed, chitosan, and energy). The sensitivity analysis indicates the potential debottlenecking of suboptimal 2 with the use of a catalyst to improve the conversion of bio-oil in the pyrolysis pathway and exhibits a gross profit of 22.54% higher than that of the optimal solution. Following the Shapley-Shubik power index analysis, the hydroponics facility is identified as the pivotal player for both optimal and suboptimal 2 cases with the exception of suboptimal 1 indicating both BSF and hydroponics as a pivotal player. In brief, this research provides the fish waste-based industry with insights and strategies for the implementation of a circular economy as a step toward sustainable development.

Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island: The Climate Crisis and Planetary Environmentalism

ABSTRACT Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019), in addressing the planetary scale of the climate crisis, gestures to the possibility of, and the imperative for, multispecies as well as multi-ethnic and cross-cultural cooperation as a way of facing climate change. The parallel that Ghosh draws between human and animal migrations, resulting from climate change, underlines the novel’s emphasis on multispecies climate justice. By connecting the refugee influx into the Western world to the environmental crisis beyond the West, the novel also concerns itself with social, racial, and historical injustices, drawing attention to the role of European colonization and the present-day global capitalism in escalating the climate crisis. I discuss the characteristics of environmentalism that I identify within Gun Island using the term “planetary environmentalism.” This kind of environmentalism extends beyond any geographical boundary created by humans, as borders lose their meaning when the future of the whole planet is at threat. I argue that the novel, through planetary environmentalism, raises a cry for multispecies justice as a question of multispecies survival to face the challenges of the planetary crisis caused by climate change.

Ratty places – unsettling human-centeredness in ecological inquiry with young people

Posthumanist orientations have underlined the need to foster non-hierarchical relations with other-than-human beings to adequately attend to planetary crises and help life to survive and flourish. Since a posthumanist critique towards natural sciences has mostly leaned on questioning the premise of human subjects making sense of objectified nature, little effort has been made to explore if and how scientific research and posthumanist approaches might intersect and co-exist without abandoning their respective aims. In this paper, we analyse a case of ecological citizen science inquiry on urban rats to explore theoretical and practical opportunities for environmental education that arise from bridging the posthumanist call for attentiveness towards multispecies worlds with ecological research endeavor. We reconceptualize ecological inquiry as sharing atmospheres with other animals as well as through its material aspects to articulate conceptual tools to disrupt the subject-object division of knowledge creation between humans and other animals.

Assessing the Human Health Benefits of Climate Mitigation, Pollution Prevention, and Biodiversity Preservation.

Since the Industrial Revolution, humanity has amassed great wealth and achieved unprecedented material prosperity. These advances have come, however, at great cost to the planet. They are guided by an economic model that focuses almost exclusively on short-term gain, while ignoring natural capital and human capital. They have relied on the combustion of vast quantities of fossil fuels, massive consumption of the earth's resources, and production and environmental release of enormous quantities of chemicals, pesticides, fertilizers, and plastics. They have caused climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss, the "Triple Planetary Crisis". They are responsible for more than 9 million premature deaths per year and for widespread disease - impacts that fall disproportionately upon the poor and the vulnerable. To map the human health impacts of climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss. To outline a framework for assessing the health benefits of interventions against these threats. Actions taken by national governments and international agencies to mitigate climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss can improve health, prevent disease, save lives, and enhance human well-being. Yet assessment of health benefits is largely absent from evaluations of environmental remediation programs. This represents a lost opportunity to quantify the full benefits of environmental remediation and to educate policy makers and the public. We recommend that national governments and international agencies implementing interventions against climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss develop metrics and strategies for quantifying the health benefits of these interventions. We recommend that they deploy these tools in parallel with assessments of ecologic and economic benefits. Health metrics developed by the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study may provide a useful starting point.Incorporation of health metrics into assessments of environmental restoration will require building transdisciplinary collaborations. Environmental scientists and engineers will need to work with health scientists to establish evaluation systems that link environmental and economic data with health data. Such systems will assist international agencies as well as national and local governments in prioritizing environmental interventions.

Learning ecologies and agentic pedagogies: children meeting the world

With a challenge to conceptualize an environmental/sustainability education that employs imaginaries and praxis for learning our way through and beyond our planetary crisis, we consider how posthuman creativity articulates into pedagogical practice. We share insights from our researcher/practitioner experience in two different educational settings, theorizing creative/learning ecologies with posthuman insights from Karen Barad and Dan Harris. Our two “learning ecologies” are located within: a preschool in Western Sydney; and a girls’ school in the Himalayan mountains of Uttarakhand. These learning ecologies intra-act to create agentic pedagogies, equipping children to care-take themselves and their worlds, affected as they are by the ecological distortions inherent in the Capitalocene. The pedagogies, characterized as “a pedagogy of hope” and as “a pedagogy of love and responsibility” respectively, enable students to meet and respond to the world in ways which reclaim human/nature agency.

Introduction: Contributions and reflections on Modern Heritage in the Anthropocene

AbstractModern Heritage in the Anthropocene draws from a critical selection of the 54 papers presented at the second International MoHoA conference Modern Heritage in the Anthropocene, (October 26–28, 2022), hosted by The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, in partnership with the University of Liverpool's School of Architecture. The conference expanded MoHoA's aim of encouraging equitable approaches to modern heritage as an urgent and essential response to an age of planetary crises whose roots are entangled with centuries‐old culture of extraction, exploitation, and domination. Building on the lessons learned from the first MoHoA conference, Modern Heritage of Africa (2021), hosted by the University of Cape Town and the subject of an earlier special edition of Curator (65/July 3, 2022), this second conference emphasized the interconnection between these cultures and the dawn of the Anthropocene. Participants were asked to reflect on reconceptualized formulations of modern heritage and its entangled relationship with the planetary crises experienced, albeit unevenly and unequally, by all living and nonliving things. This paper assembles and reflects on the contributions of 18 peer‐reviewed papers that collectively demonstrate the range and depth of topics presented. In the spirit of equity, diversity, and inclusivity and in line with MoHoA's decentering, decolonizing, and reframing agenda, these have also been chosen to reflect the different contributors' experiences, from senior academics to young and early career professionals.

Transformative pedagogies from innovation in times of planetary crisis. A systematic review of the literature

Transformative pedagogies from innovation in times of planetary crisis. A systematic review of the literature

Transforming research to better support societal transition to a sustainable trajectory

Abstract Non-technical summary This commentary argues that the current academic and societal pursuit of ‘solutions’ to sustainability challenges fails to acknowledge how change normally occurs in complex adaptive systems, that is, socio-economic systems and the Earth system, relevant for societal development. Such systems seldom evolve through isolated changes or ‘solutions’ but, rather, through numerous small adjustments of component parts. It is the interactions between these small adjustments that lead to system change. Thus, we argue the need for altered expectations in relation to, and a new narrative describing, the anticipated role of research in the pursuit of a more sustainable societal development trajectory. Technical summary The commentary argues for seeking multiple adjustments rather than seeking ‘solutions’ to our current planetary crises. Based on the belief that many of these adjustments may already lie dormant across academic departments, the University of Copenhagen conducted a series of ‘Transformation Labs’ in 2023 with the purpose of identifying the potential socio-economic and technical adjustments that, in combination, may catalyze societal transformation toward sustainability as well as potential barriers for their societal implementation. Here, we reflect on the learnings from the exercise and argue that both current funding practices and university training should be modified to support this altered narrative. In addition, interactions between research institutions and the beyond-academic world should be strengthened. Social media summary For reaching a sustainable trajectory, research needs to focus on multiple adjustments rather than fixed solutions.

Will the Global Plastics Treaty break the plastic wave? The beginning of a long discussion road

Abstract We are experiencing the effects of the triple planetary crisis—climate change, loss of nature, and pollution—aggravated by plastic pollution. Despite widespread global awareness of the adverse effects of plastic pollution, its ongoing increase remains persistent, with an annual increase in plastic consumption and incorrect disposal contributing to this serious problem. In 2022, 175 nations agreed to begin negotiations by the end of 2024 on a binding international agreement to control the life cycle of plastics, including preventing marine pollution. To ensure the efficacy of the Global Plastics Treaty for mitigating plastic pollution, the extensive participation of researchers is imperative. The literature focuses on efforts in line with ongoing negotiations. In this study, a systematic review of the Global Plastics Treaty was conducted. The analyzed literature mainly focuses on the adverse effects of plastic pollution, legislation, governance, and the economy. The resulting comprehensive overview of the subject can support ongoing negotiations and guide future research about the Global Plastics Treaty.

An anthropocene-framed transdisciplinary dialog at the chemistry-energy nexus.

At the energy-chemistry nexus, key molecules include carbon dioxide (CO2), hydrogen (H2), methane (CH4), and ammonia (NH3). The position of these four molecules and that of the more general family of synthetic macromolecular polymer blends (found in plastics) were cross-analyzed with the planetary boundary framework, and as part of five scientific policy roadmaps for the energy transition. According to the scenarios considered, the use of some of these molecular substances will be drastically modified in the coming years. Ammonia, which is currently almost exclusively synthesized as feedstock for the fertilizer industry, is envisioned as a future carbon-free energy vector. "Green hydrogen" is central to many projected decarbonized chemical processes. Carbon dioxide is forecast to shift from an unavoidable byproduct to a valuable feedstock for the production of carbon-based compounds. In this context, we believe that interdisciplinary elements from history, economics and anthropology are relevant to any attempted cross-analysis. Distinctive and crucial insights drawn from elements of humanities and social sciences have led us to formulate or re-raise open questions and possible blind-spots in main roadmaps, which were developed to guide, inter alia, chemical research toward the energy transition. We consider that these open questions are not sufficiently addressed in the academic arena around chemical research. Nevertheless, they are relevant to our understanding of the current planetary crisis, and to our capacity to properly assess the potential and limitations of chemical research addressing it. This academic perspective was written to share this understanding with the broader academic community. This work is intended not only as a call for a larger interdisciplinary method, to develop a sounder scientific approach to broader scenarios, but also - and perhaps mostly - as a call for the development of radically transdisciplinary routes of research. As scientists with different backgrounds, specialized in different disciplines and actively involved in contributing to shape solutions by means of our research, we bear ethical responsibility for the consequences of our acts, which often lead to consequences well beyond our discipline. Do our research and the knowledge it produces respond, perpetuate or even aggravate the problems encountered by society?

OneHealth: uno stile per la vita di tutti i giorni

It is now widely understood that in order to respond to the climate emergency and the ongoing planetary crisis, all sectors, including Education and Training, are called to intervene in their activities and, above all, in the way they prepare learners for the future. During the School Year 2021-22, in collaboration between Pediatrics and the Family Health District, IOR, Provincial School Office, Cesena City Council Department, a Peer Education was activated with the students of some high schools in Cesena (more than forty), as a result of which we were able to verify how this issue activates an important interest in the children, both as a personal cultural deepening and as a spillover of knowledge on peers: in fact, more than.

L’incerto: Paura e bisogno del confine

The concept of border is a much-debated topic, also due to numerous planetary crises of political, economic, and religious origin. The present author supports both the usefulness and the necessity of the border qua psychological entity, insofar as its proper function allows for the process of psychological identification to occur. Moreover, the speed of major socio-cultural changes characterising the contemporary era is argued to be compromising the dynamic psychological balance between growth and transformation, whilst providing the illusion of the psyche as an undifferentiated whole.

The Forgotten Dreams of History-from-Below

Abstract In his 2003 essay, “On Agency,” Walter Johnson faulted the way scholars’ focus on agency presumed a “unidirectional trade between past and present,” treating “history writing as a mode of redress.” It marginalized “human-ness lived outside the conventions” of a “liberal notion of selfhood.” Restoring agency to the enslaved made the scholar feel better about themselves without making the world any better: “therapy rather than politics.” Looking back on this pivotal assessment of social history from the vantage of twenty years, its criticisms seem relevant to the use of agency in its time (and ours) more than to the concept’s original invention in the era of decolonization after World War II. In that time, drawing on anticolonial thought, history-from-below emerged precisely to contest liberal notions of selfhood and reform the existing, whiggish two-way trade between past and present. Revisiting that turn reminds us that questions raised by the category of “agency” were present at its making and that it is unlikely that academic scholarship can fulfill more than a therapeutic function without affiliated struggles to remake the academy and popular politics. Reminding us of history-from-below's foundational commitment to building up “the present-life of the past” and challenging the individuated ideal of selfhood, this essay notes the continued urgency of recovering alternative subjectivities as we face the planetary crisis created by dominance of Enlightenment notions of history and selfhood. Though scholarship in the academy may not be capable of the political impact Johnson imagined, it nevertheless furthers history’s actual end of internal transformation.

Green Großraum: Carl Schmitt’s political ecology of space

How scholars conceptualize the driving forces of planetary crisis is intimately connected to how they conceptualize solutions to it. Recent scholarship has drawn on the work of Carl Schmitt, Nazi jurist and political philosopher, to articulate concepts in political ecology. These works of political ecology, however, do not engage with the problematic political history of the work and concepts developed by Schmitt. This article asks: what kinds of assumptions do we adopt when deploying Schmitt’s geographical, political, and ecological conceptual apparati? First, the article draws on the work of Minca and Rowan (2015, 2016) and Giaccaria and Minca (2016) to argue that Schmitt’s thought is geographical, that Nazi geographical thought was intimately tied to geographies of conquest on the part of the Nazis. It argues that Schmitt’s concept of Großraum or “greater space/ sphere of influence” is bound up with Schmitt’s and the Nazi’s politics of an ethnically/ racially motivated politics of “Friend versus Enemy.” The article then evaluates Schmitt’s concept of the political and considers its implications in relation to the environmental crisis of contemporary conjuncture, arguing that Schmitt’s amorphous conceptualization of the political allows the distinction between friend and enemy to be left open to interpretation, making it possible for both intellectuals and green political parties to articulate xenophobic and reactionary political positions in environmental terms.

Genocide and Ecological Ruin in Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis

Writing against the backdrop of the global pandemic of COVID- 19, Amitav Ghosh in his latest non-fiction text The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (2021), traces the contemporary planetary crisis back to a historical event popularly known as the Dutch Massacre that occurred in 1621. This massacre resulted in the ruthless exploitation of humans and the natural world by Western imperialism. Ghosh observes that the Banda islands were rich sources of nutmegs and this is the reason why Bandalese was attacked by European settlers to own nutmeg plantations. Dutch officials viewed that there could be no trade without war. The remaining Bandalese who survived the massacre went towards the forests to hide and started living with the spirits of woods, animals, and nature. For Bandalese, nature, as Carolyn Merchant claims, was a mother. The trade and business that the European settlers started along with the genocide of Bandalese continued in different forms and prepared a ground for the ecological crisis. The current predicament is the outcome of a mechanical view of the world in which nature is viewed as a resource for humans to exploit for their purposes. Drawing on the concepts of ecological theorists, this paper claims that the entire relationship of humans to non-human kind such as rivers, mountains, woods, animals, and the spirits of land should be based on reciprocity, ethics, and egalitarian concepts. The transfer of nutmeg from the original islands to the economic centers reveals a wider colonial mindset that justifies the exploitation of the entire ecology, which continues to lead to geopolitics, and functions as a source of planetary crisis. As the paper is qualitative, the ecocritical perspective has been applied to the primary text to conclude that the environmental crisis, seen or unseen, is rooted in colonial practices and capitalism.