Nature and Culture

Even in countries long considered water-secure, challenges relating to water availability, water quality, and the consequences of increasingly extreme weather events such as droughts and heavy rainfall are now becoming evident. Together, these developments create the need for transformations across all levels of society. This generates new conflicts and calls for public debate. While public spheres are under pressure, we postulate that water literacy is required to manage these transformation tasks in a way that is consistent with sustainable development. We discuss the difficult conditions of today’s public sphere and contrast this with the perspective of a pragmatist understanding of democracy. Building on this perspective, we conclude by proposing theses toward an encompassing conception of water literacy.

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, originally published in 1962, addressed the harmful human and environmental effects of pesticides. It is often associated with the beginning of the modern environmental movement in the United States. This article provides a deeper engagement with Carson’s analysis of social and ecological processes, revealing how specific synthetic chemicals lead to harmful outcomes. We demonstrate how Silent Spring builds upon and extends ecological materialism and metabolic analysis, within the context of the Anthropocene, to understand novel, emergent environmental and health problems associated with pesticides, which provides a foundation for comprehending current ecological catastrophes.

This article examines young people’s pathways toward climate activism and how they relate to consumption practices. Based on 21 narrative interviews with younger adults in Germany, we identified different types of consumption practices and corresponding attitudes toward sustainability among activists, supporters, and non-supporters of the climate movement. We highlight how supporters and activists associated with the climate movement Fridays for Future (FFF) extend their sustainable consumption practices. The evolution of sustainability practices emerged in parallel with the development of the personal meaning attributed to them. However, over time, the group of activists has come to regard individual consumption as increasingly less important for climate protection. Paradoxically, they still practice sustainable consumption, but rather emphasize their political activism.

Environmental injustice impacts reproductive justice, restricting communities’ ability to have and raise children in a safe and healthy environment. Despite acute linkages between environmental and reproductive health injustices, these frameworks remain largely siloed. To help fill this gap, we analyzed the environmental reproductive health concerns of 20 women in Montana, a predominantly rural state with a history of environmental extraction, using a qualitative descriptive methodology within an environmental reproductive justice (ERJ) framework. Our findings demonstrate five key themes: “water contamination and scarcity,” “air pollution,” “paradox of place,” “lack of effective action and accountability,” and “infrastructure concerns.” Potential measures to support ERJ include improved environmental exposure communication and testing, government and corporation accountability, and reconciling environmental and reproductive health in research and practice.

This article engages with justification theory to explore the underlying assumptions, logics, and methodological approaches that shape common good arguments concerning the value and use of marine nature. Seven distinct “orders of worth”—Market, Industrial, Civic, Fame, Domestic, Inspired, and Green—are each explored in the context of the marine. Each order offers distinct normative claims on what is right or wrong in how we use and value marine nature and spaces, using particular language resources, worthy objects and subjects to argue these principled positions. Examples are drawn from seaweed harvesting and salmon farming, particularly as these relate to two dispute cases in Ireland, to illustrate the distinct arguments and justification processes relating to marine value. This article contributes to understandings of the values and politics shaping the future of marine space and nature.

Nadina Galle. 2024. The Nature of Our Cities: Harnessing the Power of the Natural World to Survive a Changing Planet. New York and Boston: Mariner Press.