Whistling the Death March? Listening in to the Acoustics of Ludwig Leichhardt's Australian Exploration

Scholars considering the acoustics of exploration have focused on how explorers heard Australian space in terms of silence, to argue this silenced Indigenous presence, or that stillness, was incongruous with how a place to be colonised should sound. I focus on the acoustically attuned Ludwig Leichhardt, a science-poet indebted to the Enlightenment, but also engaged with the German Romantic legacy. The manifold acoustic dimensions of expeditioning – including music – were important to him in different ways. The acoustic world could be assayed and harnessed in ways that were often consistent with colonialism. But there was also something fugitive about acoustics. They could mark a site for emotional engagement with place, and sometimes embryonic cross-cultural dialogue. Yet the possibilities were not always heard and, in line with Romanticism, the acoustic could drag down expeditioners’ spirits just as it could buoy them up. It could baffle or be a site for Indigenous resistance.     

Mably and Berne

The Swiss Cantons had no greater admirer in the eighteenth-century than the French political thinker Gabriel Bonnot de Mably. The feeling was mutual, at least to some extent, since the Bernese Patriotic Society awarded its first prize in 1763 to Mably, for his dialogue Entretiens de Phocion. The prize then led to an exchange of letters, stretching across some two decades, with Daniel Fellenberg, founder of the Patriotic society—the most important block of Mably's correspondence to have survived. This essay considers the 1763 prize and the correspondence with Fellenberg for the light they cast both on Mably and on Bernese participation in the wider currents of eighteenth-century thought.     

After Structure Planning: The New Sub-regional Planning in England

The reformed planning system introduced in England in 2004 weakens the position of counties and unitary authorities. Regional bodies and central government have a larger say on the future shape of localities under these arrangements. In particular sub-regional strategies have a much bigger role within the new Regional Spatial Strategies. This paper examines the prospects for the influence of this new tier of planning, based on government guidance about sub-regional planning and on the evidence on emerging practice, particularly in the southern regions of England. The balance of influence of different actors is changing, both between government tiers and in wider governance relations. The prospects for integrated action in spatial terms are changing, as are the relationships to implementation.     

The Potential of e-Learning to Address the Needs of Out-of-School Youth in the Philippines

This paper reports on the findings of focus group discussions designed to explore the learning and skills-based needs of out-of-school youth in the Philippines, particularly addressing their reasons for leaving school, their current activities and employment, how they acquire skills and knowledge, what they want to learn about, their use of Information and Communication Technologies, and their future employment plans. It was undertaken in the context of the development of a programme of e-learning through ICT Centres to be delivered in support of the country's 5 million out-of-school youth.     

Domesticated Landscapes: The Subsistence Ecology of Plant and Animal Domestication

Harvesting different species as foods or raw materials calls for differing skills depending on the species being harvested and the circumstances under which they are being taken. In some situations and for some species, the tactics used are mainly behavioral—that is, people adjust, or adapt, their own actions to fit the behavior and circumstances of the species they are taking. Under other circumstances and for other species, the skills and tactics used may call for greater environmental preparation or manipulation. Therefore, instead of trying to distinguish people today and in the past as either foragers or farmers, it makes sense to define human subsistence behavior as an interactive matrix of species and harvesting tactics, that is, as a provisions spreadsheet.     

Ecological Functions and Functionings: Towards a Senian Analysis of Ecosystem Services

Ecosystem services are part of a growing trend within environment and development to analyse environmental change within the context of socially valued outcomes. Yet, ecosystem services‐based policies and analyses are increasingly criticized for failing to connect with, or even for restricting, development outcomes. This article seeks to connect environmental analysis with development outcomes better by applying the capability approach of Amartya Sen and others. It demonstrates how scientific analysis of ecosystem services sometimes conflates pathways of ecosystem management with development outcomes, but that it can be reconfigured to include more diverse values and objectives. The article argues that ecosystem services should be identified more as ‘functionings’ (in the Senian sense of valued development outcomes) rather than ‘functions’ (in the sense of biophysical, apolitical ecosystem properties) in order to indicate that ‘services’ always reflect social values, and that values and scientific explanations of underlying biophysical properties evolve together. Environmental science for socially valued outcomes such as ecosystem services is therefore an important site of political inclusion and exclusion. The article illustrates this analysis with examples of ecosystem‐based adaptation to climate change from the World Bank and government of Bangladesh, and in contrast to differing approaches from the field of sustainability science.