"Statues of Memnon at Thebes, during The Inundation", a lithography from 1848 by Scottish artist David Roberts. It appeared in Roberts book on the Nile region entitled "Egypt & Nubia" published in London the same year. The flooding of the Nile has been an...
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 times like these, what the world needs is good humor and good counseling. And this company apparently offers both. Because if you name your business consulting company after a city that spectacularly sank into the sea as a punishment for the hubris of it's...
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...
Just 31 years lie between two disasters of the same nature along the shores of a lake in Western Norway destroying twice the two lakeside villages. Lake Lovatnet is considered one of the most beautiful lakes in Norway. In the first decade of the 1900s and again in the...
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...
Every year at Ascension Day (Ascensione di Cristo, or "Festa della Sensa" as the Venetians say, it is celebrated in May) the Republic of Venice celebrates itself but also it's intimate relationship to the sea. In the age of Renaissance the head of state, called the...
Paraty is a small town and tourist location on Brazil's Costa Verde, between Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Rising as high as 1,300 meters behind the town are tropical forests and mountains. The village was founded in 1597 and established formally as a town by...