This posting follows close on the heels of the last one, which summarized an interdisciplinary conference I attended on “Rivers of the Anthropocene.” The conference left me with a lot to consider. There has been some informal discussion on Twitter about what an equivalent conference organized around coasts would look like. What is the anthropocene […]
Last week I attended a remarkable two-day conference in Indianapolis that brought together earth scientists, life scientists, social scientists, artists, historians, and theologians in a wide-ranging program about people and rivers in the anthropocene. The “anthropocene” is a new term expressing the idea that the human impact on the earth’s crust, the atmosphere, and the […]
In his TV series The Shock of the New, the art historian Robert Hughes remarked that politicians don’t like port towns. They are too colorful and ungovernable. He made this statement while discussing Brazil’s decision to build a futuristic capital city from scratch. Brasilia, by implication, was a rejection of Rio de Janeiro. Next, Hughes […]
I just finished Lena Lenček and Gideon Bosker’s The Beach: The History of Paradise on Earth. [1] There’s a lot to think about here, but the most intriguing part of the book for me was the discussion of how many well-known modern beach resorts were—in various senses—built on reclaimed land, and cannot survive in their […]
Most of my readers, like me, will be shivering in the hemisphere of cold, snow, and ice for the next few months. If only for relief, I thought this would be a good season to write about more summery themes. My next few postings will be about the modern beach. It’s been a while since […]
I’ve received a number of questions about islands this year. In response, I’m trying to catch up on the scholarship surrounding them. This will be an ongoing process, but today I can offer a progress report. Utopias and Lost Worlds In Eccentric Islands, the poet and travel writer Bill Holm celebrated offbeat destinations like Iceland […]
