Hijacking the Narrative: The First World Forum on Natural Capital, #natcap13, and Radical Dissent

The first World Forum on Natural Capital (WFNC) was an important moment in the production of “valued” nature. It brought together bankers, CEOs, and business elites to promote financialized environmental accounting as a solution to ecosystem degradation. Anti‐capitalist activists, however, opposed the further intrusion of economic logic to environmental decision‐making and resisted its progression. While WFNC organizers were able to advance the concept of “natural capital” through traditional (print and web 1.0) media, they struggled to control the social media narrative. Digital activists were able to challenge the official narrative on Twitter and compel organizers to address the associated social and environmental justice concerns. As such, social media produced the conditions for both abstracting nature into value‐bearing commodities and, simultaneously, resisting such abstraction. Drawing on theories of counterpublic organization, public spheres of deliberation, and agonistic confrontation, this paper explores the discursive co‐production of nature in a new digitally mediated world.     

Hunter-gatherer tobacco smoking: earliest evidence from the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America

Chemical analysis of residue extracted from stone pipes and pipe fragments excavated at sites in the southern Pacific Northwest Coast of North America demonstrate that hunter-gatherers smoked the psychostimulant tobacco (Nicotiana sp.) by at least AD 860. Non-farming ethno-historic Native Americans throughout the west gathered and sometimes cultivated tobacco for ritual and religious purposes, but until now the antiquity of the practice on this part of the continent was unknown. Method validation includes chemical characterization of a suite of smoke plants and experimental reproduction of “smoked” pipe chemistry; results indicate biomarkers are traceable for several species commonly smoked by ethnographic native peoples, including tobacco (nicotine, cotinine), tree tobacco (anabasine), and kinnikinnick (arbutin). Developed methods—where residue is extracted directly from the stone or clay matrix of whole and fragmentary archaeological pipes—may be applied in similar studies investigating the spread and use of ritual smoke plants in the ancient Americas and elsewhere.     

Mechanisms of fluid flow and fluid–rock interaction in fossil metamorphic hydrothermal systems inferred from vein–wallrock patterns, geometry and microstructure

Comparison of mass transfer patterns, geometry and microstructures developed within and around veins allows the interpretation of processes of fluid flow during deformation, metamorphism and mineralization. A classification of vein types based on the degree of interaction with wallrock (using petrological, geochemical or isotopic indicators) can be used to identify a range of processes, from closed system behaviour in which the vein mass is derived from local wallrock, through to open system behaviour in which the vein mass is derived externally. Microstructural characteristics, such as wallrock selvages, multiple growth events recorded by vein seams and vein crystal morphology, also help to constrain mass transfer patterns during vein formation. We present a range of processes for vein formation, including: (i) the formation of closed system fibrous veins by dissolution–precipitation creep, including varieties in which tensile failure is not required; (ii) pressure‐ or kinetically dependent closed system segregation veins in which transfer of soluble components from wallrock to vein leaves behind a residual selvage; (iii) similar vein–selvage patterning, but with mass imbalances between vein and wallrock requiring fluid advection through both interconnected fracture networks and in the surrounding permeable rock; and (iv) the proposed formation of veins by fluid ascent in mobile hydrofractures, in which isotopic or chemical disequilibrium within and around the vein suggests that the crack and fluid within it moved essentially as one. The postulate of rapid fluid and mass transfer via such mobile hydrofractures has implications for the release of volatiles from metamorphic terrains. Also, consideration of a broad range of possible vein‐forming mechanisms is highly desirable when dealing with mineral deposits found in deformed, metamorphosed rocks, because closed system veining may produce patterns that, if erroneously recognized as being open systems, could lead to false interpretations of the role of tectonic fracturing in ore genesis.     

Geography's difficult engagement with the psychological therapies

The consideration of psychoanalytic issues presents geography and geographers with a number of difficulties; this paper examines those difficulties from within a humanistic perspective. The most common geographical engagements with the psychological therapies have been with their psychodynamic and, to a lesser extent, humanist methodological forms. A humanist perspective on this engagement suggests that it has led to two associated problems. At a disciplinary level it has resulted in an approach that has tended to privilege intellectual knowledge at the expense of emotion, and at a personal level it has not encouraged an approach that is sensitive to difference. This essay proposes that a commitment to an engaged, 'congruent' listening might help temper these difficulties.     

In/different cities: a case for contact at the margins

Long before embarking on the academic life of a geographer, I made films about cities. In the following essay, I reflect on a series of my short films, shot in the magical aesthetic of super8 film, which meditate on themes that continue to preoccupy and interest many urban geographers, in particular, the dialectic between social life and the built landscape of contemporary urban space. A central argument suggested by these cinematic excursions is that the margins of urban space share an immediate homology with the margins of the social self and that experiencing difference in spatial life is a political and social good analogous to regular encounter with difference in the lives of strangers. Such experiences of difference, these films suggest, are under threat in the neoliberal city in which gentrification, privatisation, labour deregulation and urban policing increasingly homogenise and politically neutralise the social landscape. The films can be viewed at http://www.brettstory.com/category/films-video/     

Baudelaire's “Teacher”: Joseph de Maistre and Le Spleen de Paris

For a total of twenty years (1856–76), Gustave Flaubert corresponded with a woman whom he would never meet and who had first written to him to express her admiration for his novel, Madame Bovary. These forty-five letters are among the most fascinating and important that he was to write, reflecting on his life, on art and esthetics, and on his determined dedication to the practice of writing. The letters to Marie-Sophie Leroyer de Chantepie occupy a central role in Flaubert's Correspondence, between the long series of letters he wrote to two other women, Louise Colet and George Sand. They are all dominated by the idea of the centrality of art, literature, and the activity of writing, and of the subordinate status of all other experiences and interests.     

Pius XII: Romanita,prophesy and charisma

The modern popular cult of the Pope, which originated with the ‘disinherited’ papacy of Pius IX, reached its acme with Pius XII. Phases of intensification of this cult, which was linked to other ‘devotions’, those of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and of the Virgin Mary, served to mobilize the Catholic masses at critical junctures for the Catholic Church and in the face of what were perceived as political threats. Pius XII had to animate ‘movement’ in an age proclaimed to be one of a unique crisis of civilization. The projection of him as a charismatic figure was linked to that of Rome as a sacred centre and as the very fulcrum of world history. The Catholic activist ethos of ‘movement’ and also the presentation of the interchange between Pius XII and the Crowd had features in common with Fascist rhetorics, but ultimately the cult of the ‘victim‐Pope’ represented an inversion of the crasser forms of power‐imagery.