Vegetal politics: belonging,practices and places

Cultural geography has a long and proud tradition of research into human–plant relations. However, until recently, that tradition has been somewhat disconnected from conceptual advances in the social sciences, even those to which cultural geographers have made significant contributions. With a number of important exceptions, plant studies have been less explicitly part of more-than-human geographies than have animal studies. This special issue aims to redress this gap, recognising plants and their multiple engagements with and beyond humans. Plants are not only fundamental to human survival, they play a key role in many of the most important environmental political issues of the century, including biofuels, carbon economies and food security. In this introduction, we explore themes of belonging, practices and places, as discussed in the contributing papers. Together, the papers suggest new kinds of ‘vegetal politics’, documenting both collaborative and conflictual relations between humans, plants and others. They open up new spaces of political action and subjectivity, challenging political frames that are confined to humans. The papers also raise methodological questions and challenges for future research. This special issue grew out of sessions we organised at the Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting in New York in 2012.     

Shaming and Sanitation in Indonesia: A Return to Colonial Public Health Practices?

Adequate sanitation is vital to human health, yet progress on the Millennium Development Goal for sanitation has been slow and the target is likely to be missed by one billion people. Indonesia has the third highest number of people of any country in the world without access to sanitation and, like most developing countries, it is devoting insufficient resources to the issue. In rural areas, rather than providing additional funding, the government — with support of the World Bank — has promoted the Community‐Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) approach, which uses social mobilization to encourage people to construct their own latrines. In Indonesia as elsewhere, CLTS involves more than just education and encouragement; it uses social shaming and punishments. The authors argue that this is not only an inadequate approach but one which echoes coercive, race‐based colonial public health practices. This article thus integrates extant historiography on Indonesian colonial medicine with contemporary scholarly literature and field research on CLTS using case studies of a 1920s hookworm‐eradication programme funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, and the current World Bank Water and Sanitation Programme, both in Java.     

Einstein et «Zweistein»

As the sobriquet «Zweistein» suggests, within the theoretical physics community Wolfgang Pauli came to be regarded as second in eminence only to Albert Einstein. Over a period of thirty-five years, they interacted both intellectually and personally. This paper focuses on four interrelated topics of their discussions. 1) The theory of relativity: at the age of twenty, Pauli prepared the definitive survey of relativity, a survey which he revised near the end of his life and which remains invaluable to physicists and historians of physics. 2) Unified field theories: although initially sympathetic to Einstein's search for a unified theory of electromagnetism and gravitation, and having made important contributions to the subject, Pauli came to regard such efforts as fruitless. 3) Foundations of quantum mechanics: Pauli's negative evaluation of Einstein's program grew out of their sharply differing evaluations of the role that quantum mechanics would play in the future, development of theoretical physics. 4) Quantum gravity: Pauli recognized that, until the achievement of a successful reconciliation of quantum mechanics and general relativity — an achievement that still eludes us — Einstein's challenge to quantum mechanics could not be laid to rest.     

BaltCoast Abgestimmte Lösungen für gemeinsame Probleme der Küstenzonenentwicklung im Ostseeraum

Abstrakt Nach einer Laufzeit von gut drei Jahren wurde das INTERREG III B Ostseeraum Projekt BaltCoast, für das das Ministerium für Arbeit, Bau und Landesentwicklung Mecklenburg-Vorpommern die Federführung übernommen hatte, im September 2005 abgeschlossen. Dabei ist es gelungen, transnationale Kernempfehlungen zur Rolle der Raumplanung im Rahmen des Integrierten Küstenzonenmanagements (IKZM) und zur Ausweitung der Raumplanung auf See zu erarbeiten. Die mit BaltCoast gewonnenen Erfahrungen und Ergebnisse wurden bereits eingebracht in die sechste Konferenz der für Raumordnung zust?ndigen Minister der Ostseeanrainerstaaten (freiwillige Zusammenarbeit im Rahmen der Initiative „Visions and Strategies around the Baltic Sea 2010“ – kurz VASAB). Sie fand im September 2005 in Danzig statt. Die Ergebnisse von BaltCoast sollen auch im Hinblick auf die regionale Agenda Baltic 21 beraten werden. Darüber hinaus wurden sie bei der nationalen IKZM-Strategie berücksichtigt, die unter Federführung des Bundesministeriums für Umwelt erarbeitet wurde. Noch w?hrend der Laufzeit von BaltCoast konnte damit ein erster Schritt zur politischen Umsetzung der Projekterfahrungen und -ergebnisse realisiert werden.     

Piot,Personhood, Place and Mobility in Lihir,Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT This paper is an exploration of the nature of personhood through the medium of the concept of piot in the Lihir islands, Papua New Guinea. Piot is an embodied experience in response to the movement of others in space. When people leave or arrive at a place and spend the night, others in the area feel unwell. Piot is thus one aspect of the relations between persons. I suggest that ideas of relational personhood are inadequate to fully comprehend piot, and, following LiPuma (1998) and Clay (1986) rather than Strathern (1988), argue that persons in Lihir are more than just relational beings who always act with others in mind. Piot is predicated on the dual themes of fixed sociality and mobility that are important in Lihir as elsewhere in Melanesia (cf Eves 1998; Patterson 2002). Through piot, persons comment on and sanction the movement of others, yet this mobility still occurs.