In a comic book by French authors Benoit Sokal and Francois Schuiten from 2022, an ancient maritime myth is picked up in a comic format. The story is about a small community of refugees who once settled on the back of a giant whale floating in the ocean. The animal is...
In my search for books that could be considered "climate literature" or "climate change narratives" I recently came across a volume by Swiss writer Max Frisch, entitled "Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän" (english edition titled "Man in the Holocene"). Frisch wrote the...
An image from the movie "The Wave" from 2015. In "Being Ecological" Tim Morton wonders about the prevalent mode of climate writing, which he calls "information dump", "dumping massive platefuls of facts on to us" over and over again. Morton wonders, why we do that and...
In a 1971 special edition of Architectural Review devoted to the lagoon city author Jan Morris proposes to simply let the city sink. It's a polemical claim, but one that takes the ambivalences and dilemmata of historic heritage seriously. A different, longer version...
The 19. Century was not only the century of industrialization, the spark that "set human civilization aflame" (Andri Snaer Magnason). Between 1800 and 1815 half a dozen large volcanic eruptions all across the globe significantly changed the climate in China as well as...
Three texts, three authors, three different contexts - all describing the amphibious but perilous life style of the inhabitants of Bangkok, the capital of Thailand: In her essay from 2018 on contemporary flood protection in several metropolises across Asia, researcher...
There is a beautifully written passage on the submerged continent and city Atlantis to be found in Jules Verne's famous novel published in French in 1869/1870. The English translation of the chapter is available online. For simplicity reasons I simply copy the link to...
This is the cover of the 2022 edition of J.R.R. Tolkien's stories about the sunken island kingdom Numenor, with an illustration by Alan Lee. In Tolkien's oeuvre Numenor is geographically situated west of Middle-Earth and shows strong similarities to Plato's Atlantis....
In a comic book from the Belgian comic series Marsupilami the artists Batem and Yann create a satire on megalomania pipe dreams of the super rich and the fascination of the flood myth. Set in the South-American Amazon basin, the plot is based on the true stoy of Henry...
A Welsh legend tells the story of the sunken land Gwydneu (also known as "Gwydno" and later Cantre'r Gwaelod, "antref Gwaelod", "Cantref y Gwaelod" and in English ": "The Lowland Hundred") off the coast of Wales, UK. It first appears in the Llyfr Du...
