Environmental interpretation is flowering in Denmark

Abstract

Environmental interpretation is flowering in Denmark. In 1986 it was decided to carry out a three‐year experimental project with 14 environmental interpreters. Today the number of environmental interpreters has grown to 230. The inspiration came from abroad, but the project is established according to Danish cultural and democratic traditions. Some Environmental Interpreters are employed by the State in the National Forests, others by counties, local authorities, museums or ‘green associations’, but they are all linked together in the Environmental Interpreter Service with secretariat in The National Forest and Nature Agency. A modern organisation provides training courses for the interpreters and has developed a series of active interpretation methods in order to make experiencing nature an important tool in modern Danish environmental management and inspire a positive attitude to the future—to sustainable development and management. The aim of setting up an Environmental Interpreter Service was to give people interesting experiences in and knowledge of the countryside and thereby a greater understanding of the complexity of nature, the conditions for agriculture and perhaps an increased environmental consciousness. It was also the hope that if people had a greater understanding of nature, they will love and care for it better. The Brundtland Report ‘Our Common Future, the conference in Rio in 1992 and Agenda 21 has changed the Environmental Interpreters’ work. We have recognised, that it is important to use live Interpreters and not only technical media in this important work. People respond best to personal, face‐to‐face interpretation. The interpreters try to create a love of nature, and at the same time, create an understanding of local and global environmental conditions.     

In search of working‐class memory: Some questions and a tentative assessment

This article analyzes the circumstances under which the concept of mémoire ouvrière has emerged in France and its relation to a change in the conception of history as well as the status of the historian. It presents the debate that centered on the meaning and function of the research into workers’ memory and the specificity of its object. Its approach is comparative: though focusing on research done in France it refers to Great Britain, Italy and the U.S. Differences in workers’ memories according to trades, traditions and national experiences are analyzed. And so is the relationship between workers’ memory and labor organizations: it is seen to be deeply political but not one‐sided as is often claimed. La Mémoire ouvrière cannot be dissociated from workers’ consciousness, class identity and from the purposefulness of memory. Finally, the article stresses the ambiguities and contradictions faced by the attempt to recapture workers’ memory in an academic research context.     

Globaler Pflanzentransfer und seine Transferinstanzen als Kultur‐, Wissens‐ und Wissenschaftstransfer der frühen Neuzeit

In three steps, the polyvalent phenomenon of global plant transfer will be analysed. Starting from the model of cultural transfer, the latter one will be discussed in combination with network research. Finally, the connection of various instances of transfer such as botanical gardens, ships and islands will be established. The fact that botanists take part in the process of transfer increasingly and from the middle of the 18th century onwards control the plant transfers in all phases emphasises the entwinement of science and colonialism.     

Ancient DNA typing of archaeological pig remains corroborates historical records

The recent increase in both the abundance and taxonomic range of DNA sequence data in public repositories makes it possible to determine the maternal origin of lineages of faunal archaeological material by characterizing its mitochondrial DNA. Among the most commonly represented taxa are domesticated animals, for which extensive genetic characterization has revealed high levels of genetic diversity and (in at least some cases) strong phylogeographic clustering. Such information has significant implications not only for characterizing important aspects of the occupation history of archaeological sites, but also in providing novel insights into colonisation history and the scale and scope of trade and exchange networks. This can be done through studying the origins and dispersal of proxy organisms such as commensal and domesticated animals, as well as economically important wild fauna. To illustrate this approach, we compare historical records of maritime movement of people and pigs from two sites on Lord Howe Island, Australia, to phylogeographic results of DNA extracted from pig bones.     

A Decision-Making and Search Model For Intraurban Migration

Most of the research on the intraurban migration attempting to develop models of the mobility process has presented intuitively appealing statements about the residential decision process, but stopped short of a formal development of these concepts. If it is to be possible to predict the mobility pattern within the city, both the search and selection process must be more clearly specified. In this paper, a preliminary theoretical model containing decision rules similar to those found in optimal search models is developed. The model explicitly incorporates the spatial and temporal aspects of residential choice and has the potential to predict the probability that a prospective migrant will search for a new residence in a given area of the city, the time when the search process will come to a conclusion and, by implication, the expected location of the new residence. The preliminary results from the model suggest a major elaboration of the spatial and temporal aspects of residential choice under conditions of uncertainty in terms of a set of empirically measurable determinants, relating to a household's preferences, beliefs, and degree of risk aversion.     

Fixing History: Narratives of World War I in France

For nearly a century, the French have entertained an unshakable conviction that their bility to recognize themselves—to know and transmit the essence of Frenchness—depended on the teaching of the history of France. In effect, history was a discourse on France, and the teaching of history—" la pédagogie centrale du citoyen "—the means by which children were constituted as heirs and carriers of a common collective memory that made them not only citizens, but family. In this essay, I examine the rhetorical and conceptual effects on history writing that emerge out of this preoccupation with the elaboration of a continuous, coherent national identity.
Focusing on schoolbooks, I begin by looking at the dominant, nearly hegemonic model of French history created by Ernest Lavisse in the 1890s—a model informed by the dream of a unified, unitary French nation, embodied in and articulated through the history of France—and at the disruption of this paradigm in the aftermath of the Great War. I then consider a text written in the 1990s specifically to repudiate the kind of nationalist narratives that prevailed for most of this century—a new supranational history of Europe. I argue that, in their different experiments with fixing history, both Lavisse and the contemporary textbook authors did not so much repair a deficient history as produce a historical fixation, creating mythicized histories that are complete, closed, predictable, and at bottom ahistorical. Finally, I turn to a recent World War I novel, A Very Long Engagement by SébastienJaprisot, in order to suggest ways in which the narrative strategies of a fiction writer may be useful to historians in thinking about a different kind of historical project.     

The future of the NPT1

Despite the 2005 NPT Review Conference ending problematically, there remains no real alternative to that regime for controlling the spread of nuclear weapons. Any replacement of the current regime would only compound existing problems and challenges. We cannot afford to live in a world where ‘more nuclear weapons are better’. To do so would be to avoid disarmament and create a divisive security environment. A better approach would be for the global community to strive for a true partnership in achieving non-proliferation goals.     

Nabataean or not? The ancient necropolis of Dumat. First stage: a reassessment of al‐Dayel's excavations

Two reports on excavations carried out in 1985–1986 by archaeologist Khaled Abdulaziz al‐Dayel and published in the journal Atlal (1988, 1986) have revealed the existence of ‘Hellenistic tombs’ in the Dūmat al‐Jandal oasis (ancient Adummatu/Dumat/Dumata) in northern Saudi Arabia. Although attributed more precisely to the Nabataeans by Khalil al‐Muaikel (1994), these tombs nevertheless appear not to have interested specialists of this historical period in the least. Moreover, a re‐examination of the architectural data and of the grave‐goods indicates the difficulty of establishing a link between the unearthed remains and a purely ‘Nabataean’ cultural sphere (i.e. of the Petra type). This study therefore attempts to reassess published archaeological data, formulate questions on the Nabataean presence in the oasis, and also to demonstrate the relations connecting Dumat to the great Levantine and Mesopotamian cultural spheres between the first century BC and the second century AD.