World Heritage hot spots: a global model identifies the 16 natural heritage properties on the World Heritage List most at risk from climate change

UNESCO’s 207 natural heritage World Heritage Properties are at risk from climate change, but risk varies widely among properties. I offer a global model based on multi-model general circulation model (GCM) ensembles, vulnerability and Human Influence (HII), producing the World Heritage Vulnerability Index (WHVI), a measure of relative risk among properties. Nineteen properties are most at risk (i.e. WHVI > mean + 1 SD). Those include islands (i.e. Vallée de Mai, Aldabra, East Rennell, Teide, Laurisilva of Maderia, Isole Eloie, Pitons Management Area, Morne Trois Pitons and Galapagos Islands), coastal properties (i.e. Everglades, Desembarco del Granma, High Coast and Kvarken Archipelago, Doñana, Brazilian Atlantic Islands, Ichkeul and the Sunderbans) and mountainous properties (i.e. the Pyrenees Mont Pérdu, Nanda Devi and the Valley of Flowers, and Mount Kinabalu). Three properties (i.e. Teide, Isole Eloie and the Pitons Management Area) are geologic, apparently relatively resistant to short-term climactic changes. The remaining 16 are likely to respond to climactic changes in the next 40 years; those changes may threaten their World Heritage status. Those properties are where society could most effectively invest in adaptation. I identify adaptive strategies and next steps for proactive climate change adaptation in the 16 natural heritage properties on the World Heritage List most at risk.     

Some approaches to traditional Māori knowledge

In this essay I review two books of rather different focus, but with a common thread that is oral tradition: age-old tales passed orally down the generations to maintain the histories and used to educate the young. The focus of the Metge book is traditional methods of education, while McRae’s focus is on the stories themselves.     

Gombrich’s critique of Hauser’s Social History of Art

This article examines E.H. Gombrich’s critical appraisal of Arnold Hauser’s book, The Social History of Art. Hauser’s Social History of Art was published in 1951, a year after Gombrich’s bestseller, The Story of Art. Although written in Britain for an English-speaking public, both books had their origins in the intellectual history of Central Europe: Gombrich was an Austrian art historian and Hauser was Hungarian. Gombrich’s critique, published in The Art Bulletin in 1953, attacked Hauser’s dialectical materialism and his sociological interpretation of art history. Borrowing arguments from Karl Popper’s critique of historicism, Gombrich described Hauser’s work as collectivist and deterministic, tendencies at odds with his own conception of art history. However, in his readiness to label Hauser a proponent of historical materialism, Gombrich failed to recognize Hauser’s own criticism of deterministic theories of art, especially formalism. This article investigates Gombrich’s reasons for rejecting Hauser’s sociology of art. It argues Gombrich used Hauser as an ideological counterpoint to his own version of art history, avowedly liberal and individualist in outlook.     

Reconstruction of Caprine Management and Landscape Use Through Dental Microwear Analysis: The Case of the Iron Age Site of El Turó de la Font de la Canya (Barcelona,Spain)

This paper presents the results of a pilot study using dental microwear analysis on 23 sheep and goat teeth dated to the 6th century BC from the Iron Age site of El Turó Font de la Canya (Barcelona, Spain). This study aimed to reconstruct livestock management practices and landscape use. The dental microwear pattern indicates that sheep and goats could have been grazing in the same area where vegetation was composed of shrubs, bushes and non-graminaceous plants on an eroded landscape, although additional supplies of fodder cannot be excluded. This scenario is compatible with the archaeological and palaeoenvironmental data which suggest a possibly increased territoriality, land degradation and an increase of woodland clearance during Iron Age in the North-east of the Iberian Peninsula. Furthermore, we applied two recent microwear approaches which provide more information about mortality events and the possibility of distinguishing between an intensive and extensive management. This paper demonstrates how this method can be used to better understand animal husbandry practices and landscape use in Late Prehistory.     

Evolving technology,shifting expectations: cultivating pedagogy for a rapidly changing GIS landscape

As humans and natural processes continuously reshape the surface of the Earth, there is an unceasing need to document and analyze them through the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The public is gaining more access to spatial technologies that were once only available to highly trained professionals. With technological evolution comes a requirement to transition traditional GIS training for the next generation of GIS professionals. Traditional GIS combined with non-traditional GIS (i.e. mobile and location media) and CyberGIS educational materials could attract new and diverse students into Geography departments while informing the next generation of geospatial tool builders and users. Here we pose an applied pedagogical framework for teaching cutting-edge GIS material to diverse student populations with varying levels of technological experience and professional goals. The framework was developed as part of the National Science Foundation (NSF) CyberGIS Fellows program and was applied as a course template at the University of Washington Tacoma’s Master’s of Science in Geospatial Technologies. We chart how the framework developed into a cyclical structure from our original conceptualization as a hierarchy. This changed the epistemological orientation accommodating the shifting technological terrain of the GIS landscape to improve the skills of those driving the machines.     

Sixteenth‐Century English Geographers: Earth Scientists as an ‘Organic Intelligentsia’

Charting an Empire: Geography at the English Universities, 1580–1620. By Lesley B. Cormack (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997) xvi+281 pp. $68.00/£54.50 cloth, $23.95/£19.25 paper.     

Some thoughts on the ‘givenness of everyday life’ in Australian international relations: Theory and practice

Reality, it seems, is not what it used to be in international relations. In recent times many of the givens of the postwar world have undergone remarkable and often dramatic change. In the Gorbachev era, for example, ideologies have been reordered, boundaries redrawn, alliances reconstituted, new symbols of identification constructed and old identities resurrected. Recently, also, patterns of thought and behaviour, deemed to correspond with an enduring, essential reality in international life have come under increasing scrutiny within the international relations community. Accordingly, in the United States in particular, a new critical literature has emerged concerned to confront intellectual and policy sectors with the limitations, omissions, silences and givens of conventional approaches to international relations at a historical moment resonant with old dangers and unique opportunities. This paper represents a brief introduction to an Australian audience of some of the issues associated with this new literature. It seeks also to emphasise its relevance via an unconventional discussion on some major thinkers and important foreign policy themes.