This annual yearbook presents essays in environmental history based on lectures given at the Göttingen study group “Environmental History” by external authors. As previous yearbooks it is dedicated to the plurality of approaches in environmental history and serves as a valuable source for information about current research in that realm.

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This annual yearbook presents essays in environmental history based on lectures given at the Göttingen study group “Environmental History” by external authors. As previous yearbooks it is dedicated to the plurality of approaches in environmental history and serves as a valuable source for information about current research in that realm.

Seit seiner Gründung vor annähernd 25 Jahren hat sich das Göttinger UmwelthistorischeKolloquium zu einer Einrichtung entwickelt, welche die vielfältigen,thematisch einschlägigen Aktivitäten des Standortes wie auch des deutschsprachigenRaumes durch Austausch von Forschungsergebnissen und Sichtweisenbündelt. Von hier haben auch einige Unternehmungen ihren Ausgang genommen,welche zum heutigen Profil der Umweltgeschichte spürbar beitrugen.Der Band vereinigt Beiträge zum Kolloquium des Sommersemesters 2007 und des Wintersemesters 2007/08.

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Bits and Pieces: Screening Animal Life and Death gathers pivotal and more mundane moments, dispersed across a predominantly Western history of moving images, in which animals materialize in movies and TV shows, from iconic scenes of cattle slaughter in early Soviet montage to quandaries over hunting trophies in recent home-renovation reality TV series, to animals in Black horror films. Sarah O'Brien carefully views these fragments in dialogue with germinal texts at the intersection of animal studies, film and television studies, and cultural studies. She explores the capacity of moving images to unsettle the ways in which audiences have become habituated to viewing animal life and death on screens, and, more importantly, to understanding these images as more and less connected to the “production for consumption” of animals that is specific to modern industrialization. By looking back at films and TV series in which the places and practices of killing or keeping animals enter, occupy, or slip from the foreground, Bits and Pieces takes seriously the idea that cinema and television have the capacity not only to catch but to challenge and change viewers’ regard for animals.

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We have entered a new era of nature. What remains of the borders of modern thought that separated the living from the inert, subjectivity from objectivity, the apparent from the real, the value from facts, and the human from the non-human? Can the great oppositions that presided over the modern invention of nature preserve their coherence? In Nature as Event, Didier Debaise argues that new narratives and cosmologies are needed to rearticulate what has so far remained separate. Following William James and Alfred North Whitehead, Debaise presents us with a pluralistic way of approaching nature. What would happen if we attribute subjectivity and potentiality to all beings, both human and non-human? Why could we not think of the aesthetic and affective dimension as the fabric that links everything that exists? And what if the senses of importance and value were no longer understood as exclusively limited to the human? Translation by Laureano Ralón and Román Suárez

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Monkeys are probably the animals with which we most readily identify when it comes to recognizing the human in the animal. Nevertheless, they symbolize, as it were, a fear of human degeneration. The particular human-animal relationship is the subject of this cultural history. Frank Jacob explains what role apes played for the self-perception of humans and how they were and are understood as humanoid animals, for example as objects in research and popular media. In doing so, he sheds light on a history of relationships that continues to this day, whereby the intensity of this relationship between humans and primates has been redefined again and again over the centuries.

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Multispecies Storytelling in Intermedial Practices is a speculative endeavor asking how we may represent, relay, and read worlds differently by seeing other species as protagonists in their own rights. What other stories are to be invented and told from within those many-tongued chatters of multispecies collectives? Could such stories teach us how to become human otherwise? Often, the human is defined as the sole creature who holds language, and consequently is capable of articulating, representing, and reflecting upon the world. And yet, the world is made and remade by ongoing and many-tongued conversations between various organisms reverberating with sound, movement, gestures, hormones, and electrical signals. Everywhere, life is making itself known, heard, and understood in a wide variety of media and modalities. Some of these registers are available to our human senses, while some are not. Facing a not-so-distant future catastrophe, which in many ways and for many of us is already here, it is becoming painstakingly clear that our imaginaries are in dire need of corrections and replacements. How do we cultivate and share other kinds of stories and visions of the world that may hold promises of modest, yet radical hope? If we keep reproducing the same kind of languages, the same kinds of scientific gatekeeping, the same kinds of stories about “our” place in nature, we remain numb in the face of collapse. Multispecies Storytelling in Intermedial Practices offers steps toward a (self)critical multispecies philosophy which interrogates and qualifies the broad and seemingly neutral concept of humanity utilized in and around conversations grounded within Western science and academia. Artists, activists, writers, and scientists give a myriad of different interpretations of how to tell our worlds using different media – and possibly gives hints as to how to change it, too.

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The Unnaming of Aliass performs a paradoxical quest for wildly “untold” stories in the company of one special donkey companion, a femammal of the species Equus asinus and, significantly, a registered “American Spotted Ass.” Beast of burden that she is, this inscrutable companion helped carry a ridiculous load of human longings and quandaries into a maze of hot, harrowing miles, across the US South from Mississippi to Virginia, in the summer of 2002 -- all the while carrying her own onerous and unreckoned burdens and histories. Over two decades, the original journey evolved -- from the cracking-open of a quasi-Western novel-that-never-was by an implosive pun, into an ongoing philosophical and assthetic adventure: a hybrid roadside- and barnyard-based living-art practice, wherein “Aliass” un/names something much harder to grasp than the body of a lovely little ass: protagonist, setting, and traditional Western narratives turn inside-out around this “name-that-ain’t.” Through a deeply dug-in questioning of its own authorial assumptions, The Unnaming of Aliass makes space for untold autobiographies and bright dusty lacunae, tracing ineffable tales through the tangled shapes and shadows that interweave in any environment.

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