• Energy Research
• 11. Sustainability close
• DE close
• Open Data LMU close

Rocky Flats, Colorado, USA, was the home of plutonium pit manufacturing from 1952 to 1992. Here we explore the legacy of Rocky Flats, from military industrial complex to contaminated land, and finally biorefuge. The cultural impacts of living in a toxic place are explored to create an environmental history of this socially and physically contaminated environment.

Atlantropa united a technological utopia with political visions of reform. The German architect Sörgel proposed building a giant dam across the Strait of Gibraltar to create the largest hydroelectric facility in the world and solve all of Europe's energy problems. The consequences of this large-scale project would have included serious ecological damage and environmental disasters. With the emergence of nuclear energy, which also appeared to offer a solution to the energy problem, this scheme was eventually abandoned. However, other gigantic dam projects have since been carried out around the world.

The ecovillage "Sieben Linden," established in 1997, practices an ecologically sustainable lifestyle embedded within mainstream Western society. Today, the settlement covers eighty hectares and has 120 residents, who see their project as an example and experiment in the development of an alternative, sustainable way of life. Aside from sociological and ecological aspects such as a degree of self-sufficiency and sustainable building practices, the concept of an (intentional) “community” lies at the center of this project. A number of democratic decision-making forms exist in the village, consensus being the community’s ideal: their motto is “unity in diversity.” Sieben Linden is an active member of the Global Ecovillage Network.

How do the three pillars of sustainability—environment, economy, and society—come together in the daily routines of a society? Research in Community (RIC) has given itself the goal of building a network to investigate and promote a culture of sustainability. The “Wheel of Sustainability” was developed as part of the research at RIC by Felix Wagner and Sandra Mende. It is intended to help illustrate the elements and the dynamics of a culture of sustainability and thereby give guidance for the societal organizational process, which includes reflection, negotiation, implementation, and evaluation.

Addresses various ways that water is constructed as “dangerous,” whether because there is too much (floods), too little (droughts), or because it is polluted. Mauch emphasizes that although water catastrophes have a natural origin, their effects are primarily social. It is the vulnerability of human communities that decides the magnitude of a water disaster. The consequences stand in a reciprocal relationship to a community’s technical and social resilience, which is distributed highly unequally. In general, it is the socially disadvantaged who lack the resources necessary to avoid this danger through preventive measures of their own or by means of social safety nets.

Not all transitions to a sustainable society are straightforward. In a survey conducted by Nina Wormbs and her colleague on how people justify acting unsustainably, they ran into numerous instances of cognitive dissonance. The most common ways of reasoning were economic, with people looking to “even out” negative behavior, as if paying into a climate budget. However, the author argues, this does not work for tackling the climate emergency. In caring for the planet, it is important to be aware of the immense complexity of sustainability efforts. Springs: The Rachel Caron Center Review, no. 3 (May 2023)

Kate Rigby challenges the anthropocentric perspective of many modern green city development schemes, inviting us to see cities for the multispecies locales that they truly are. Offering a set of different practices of “deep sustainability” that integrate human and more-than-human perspectives, Rigby reimagines green cities from an interdisciplinary environmental humanities perspective to see how they can also be sites of more-than-human prosperity with bio-inclusive forms of ecological citizenship.

Historically, understanding climate as a function of technology and design has not been critical to developing government policy in Australia. Postwar reconstruction, however, involved a radical departure from a reliance on conventional and imported materials to consider earth as a desirable building material and construction method. Looking to adapt to, rather than control, local landscapes, the national housing agenda was briefly shaped by environmental awareness and climatic considerations.

In this paper, we investigate whether French consumers have modified their preferences towards environmentally-friendly vehicles between 2003 and 2008. We estimate a model of demand for automobiles incorporating both consumers' heterogeneity and CO2 emissions of the vehicles. Our results show that there has been a shift in preferences towards low-emitting cars, with an average increase of 367 euros of the willingness to pay for a reduction of 10 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometer. We also stress a large heterogeneity in the evolution of preferences between consumers. Rich and young people are more sensitive to environmental issues, and our results are in line with votes for the green party at the presidential elections. We relate these changes with two environmental policies that were introduced at these times, namely the obligation of indicating energy labels by the end of 2005 and a feebate based on CO2 emissions of new vehicles in 2008. Our results suggest that such policies have been efficient tools to shift consumers utility towards environmentally-friendly goods, the shift in preferences accounting for 20% of the overall decrease in average CO2 emissions of new cars on the period.