Blog
ResourceS for Adaptation to rising sea levels and sinking cities.
This is a blog containing images, stories, songs, rituals and traditions related to flooding and flood protection from the cultural heritage of coasts worldwide. It is continuously expanded and meant as a free repository to be used by anyone working to increase resilience and well-being for front line communitiies.
Please browse through the posts or search for themes, places or centuries using the Categories. Any email comments, hints or repostings are very much appreciated by the author.
Globalize local initiatives
In this speech, Colette Pichon Battle, formerly of Gulf South Center for Law and Policy and now working with Taproot Earth, explains why in cimate...
Islands and Whales
In folktales from various cultures there are tales of sea animals so big, that they get mistaken for islands. In some stories, sailors land on them...
Praise Song for Oceania
This is a beautiful poem by CRAIG SANTOS PEREZ, a coentemporary writer from the Pacific island of Guam. The typeset is quite impressive and...
Maha Sona – the demon of graveyards
In her account of the Tsunami of December 2004 on the coast of Sri Lanka, Sunali Deraniyagala describes the first moments after she had almost...
Reconciliation and the ocean, Sonali Deraniyagala.
In her book published in 2013, Sri Lanka born academic and writer Deraniyagala describes her experiences as a flood victim in the Tsunami of 2004 in...
Japanese waves
Waves are a popular element in Japanese arts and crafts, particularly in the many wood carvings from the 19. century, like the famous "Great Wave"...
The Sea according to the Brothers Forman
These images are from an exhibition at the Japanese Palais in Dresden in 2023. The installation is by the Czech artist group Forman Brothers. The...
Lighthouse Retreat
In 2019 this 120 year old lighthouse on the Denish coast had to be moved 70 meters back The 23-meter-high lighthouse is located on a cliff about 60...
Climate Catastrophe pictured in 1986
Already in 1986 the well known German news-magazine Der Spiegel published this image on it's front page. It depicts the Dome of Cologne, one of the...
Storm sculpture in Bremerhaven
The New Harbour in Bremerhaven is protected by a dike. Behind the dike lie the German Maritime Museum, the Klimahaus and further behind the city's...
Maritime murals in German cities
Mural in Bremen Neustadt advertising the local beer company Beck's. The building and the brewery are directly adjacent to a dike that is in urgent...
The last 400.000 years
This is from the New York times in 1959. thanks to Janet Grau for the lead!
Conshelf or the Precontinent Project
Continental Shelf Station was an attempt at creating an environment in which people could live and work on the sea floor. Precontinent has been used...
Underwater City 1969
The british movie "Captain Nemo and the underwater city" by James Hill picks up the themes and main character Captain Nemo from Jules Verne's famous...
A covenant to keep the forces of chaos at bay
The book of Jeremiah in the Hebrew Testament discusses at large an ecological crisis around 600 BCE in the so called "Fertile Crescent" (a region...
The intertidal zone: New York 2140
What happens to cities when they become half or seasonally flooded? Kim Stanley Robinson draws a picture of an intertidal New York of the future,...
The Day After Tomorrow (2004)
Like no other movie Roland Emmerich's blockbuster made extensive use of the iconology of cities, and most of all of the most iconic of them all: New...
Thomas Cole: The Course of Empire (1833)
English-American painter Thomas Cole (1801 - 1848) created a series of five images depicting the rise and the destruction of an imaginary coastal...
Flooding in Guanxi, China
Flooding in Guangxi. Images provided by Damien Manspeaker (@too_much_yogurt/Instagram)
Neromanna – A film about a sunken community
https://player.vimeo.com/video/328744654?h=dbce188316 Athens based artist collective Latent Community produced this wonderful film about the story...
The case of Atafona
Atafona is a Brazilian town of 6,000 people, 200 miles up the coast from the famed beaches of Rio’s Copacabana and Ipanema. "The sea devoured...