Renewable energy innovations and sustainability transition: How relevant are spatial spillovers?

In the societal challenge to switch to renewable energy, innovation has become an ever‐increasing critical determinant. However, while sustainability transition is a global challenge, diffusion and adoption of innovation tends to be uneven in space and unequal access may cause substantial heterogeneity in energy transition. This research analyzes how domestic and foreign innovation activities in the renewable energy sector influence energy transition over time. Empirical testing shows that a country's domestic innovation activity impacts renewable electricity generation capacity sooner than foreign technological innovations. I document that there are substantial barriers to substitute foreign technologies for domestic innovation efforts in the short run but also observe that foreign technologies have a stronger impact after some years. These findings have implications for cross‐border coordination of governmental innovation support and complementary policy instruments that aim at increasing adoption speed across borders.     

The Moorehead Phase Occupation at the Emerald Acropolis

The Emerald site, also known as the Emerald Acropolis, was an early Mississippian pilgrimage center key to Cahokia’s development. This paper presents the hitherto unpublished results of two archaeological projects conducted at the site, one led by Howard Winters and Stuart Struever in 1961 and the other by Robert Hall in 1964. These investigations produced the most comprehensive information on Emerald’s Moorehead phase (1200–1300 CE) occupation, during which two of its mounds were capped, a secondary mound was constructed on the central mound, and a mound-top structure was erected on this secondary mound. Similar activities took place throughout the region during the thirteenth century, a time marked by dramatic social, political, and religious change in Greater Cahokia. Based on these data, we argue that people returned to Emerald to memorialize or draw on the powers inherent there and thus reincorporate this place into the newly imagined thirteenth century Cahokian world.     

Teaching energy geography? It’s complicated

The premise of this essay is that energy geographies are complicated, and this in itself presents some pedagogical difficulties. As someone who wants students to critically examine and confront the complexity of energy systems, it can be frustrating when students react to demonstrate frustration, apathy, or even confusion. In what follows, I will lay out three complications of teaching energy geography: (1) empirical complexity, (2) confronting fossil fuel “embeddedness,” (3) the energy culture fallacy.     

Citizenship at war: Passports and nationality in the 2008 Russian‐Georgian conflict (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

By analyzing the 2008 war between Russia and Georgia, this paper stretches the limits of the anthropology of war and citizenship. Trying to overcome anthropologists' usual unease about commenting on ‘big topics’, I examine citizenship policies ‘from above’ and ‘from below’ that potentially lead to conflict and war. Special attention is paid to the role of nationality as a crucial feature of post‐Soviet citizenship, and to citizenship as an effective means of neo‐imperial expansion. In my conclusion, I contextualize my findings within anthropological debates about citizenship and argue that the recent stress on rights and entitlements needs to be balanced by an analysis of the repressive dimensions of citizenship regimes.     

The Use of Gasoline: Value, Oil, and the "American way of life"

Abstract:  While the critical literature has focused on the geography of oil production, the politics of "outrageous" gasoline prices in the United States provide a fertile path toward understanding the wider geography of petro-capitalism. Despite the deepening contradictions of US oil consumption, "pain at the pump" discourse projects a political sense of entitlement to low priced gasoline. I use a value-theoretical perspective to examine this politics as not only about the quantitative spectrum of price, but also the historical sedimentation of qualitative use-values inscribed in the commodity gasoline. Gasoline is analyzed both as a use-value among many within the postwar value of labor power and as a singular use-value fueling broader imaginaries of a national "American way of life." While use-value still represents an open site of cultural and political struggle infused within value itself, the case of gasoline illustrates how use-values are not automatically mobilized toward politically savory ends.     

A benign bone-forming tumour (osteoma) on the skull of a fossil balaenopterid whale from the Pliocene of Chile

Hampe, O., Witzmann, F. & Asbach, P., 2014. A benign bone-forming tumour (osteoma) on the skull of a fossil balaenopterid whale from the Pliocene of Chile. Alcheringa 38, xxx–xxx. ISSN 0311–5518.

A pathology of the fossil baleen whale ‘Megaptera’ hubachi from the early Pliocene of Chile is described. It is a bony outgrowth on the left side of the supraoccipital, which is interpreted as a benign bone-forming tumour (osteoma). This diagnosis is based on X-ray imaging and CT scans of the abnormal bone, revealing a homogeneously dense internal structure with no evidence for lytic areas. The osteoma described here in ‘Megaptera’ hubachi is the first unequivocal evidence of a bone tumour in a cetacean, fossil or extant.

Oliver Hampe [oliver.hampe@mfn-berlin.de] and Florian Witzmann [florian.witzmann@mfn-berlin.de], Museum für Naturkunde, Leibniz-Institut für Evolutions- und Biodiversitätsforschung, Invalidenstraße 43, D-10115 Berlin, Germany; Patrick Asbach [patrick.asbach@charite.de], Institut für Radiologie, Charité—Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Charitéplatz 1, D-10117 Berlin, Germany. Received 28.8.2013, revised 7.11.2013, accepted 12.11.2013.     

No Place for the Political: Micro‐Geographies of the Paris Climate Conference 2015

Building upon post‐foundational political philosophies, this article scrutinizes the Paris Climate Conference in December 2015 from a micro‐geographical perspective. The analysis suggests that three different spaces exist at the site of the summit and reveals how their constituting practices and material arrangements rendered “Paris” post‐democratic. We begin with exposing the staged statements of the world's political elites in the meticulously orchestrated Leaders Event as different phenotypes of the post‐democratic condition. We then investigate the formal negotiations in the cordoned‐off backrooms, where positions within the system were at stake, but not the system as such. Finally, we wander through the strictly policed “trade fair” and unveil attempts to entice delegates into techno‐managerial solutions to the climate crisis. In the conclusion, we ponder over the prospects of environmental activism at the COPs in the light of their massive depoliticization.     

Can salmonids (Oncorhynchus spp.) be identified to species using vertebral morphometrics?

Remains of anadromous Pacific salmon and trout (genus Oncorhynchus) are common in archaeological sites from California to Alaska; however, morphological similarity generally precludes species identification, limiting the range of questions that salmonid remains can address in relation to past human use and ongoing efforts in conservation biology. We developed a relatively simple, rapid, and non-destructive way to classify salmon and trout vertebrae from archaeological contexts to species using length, height and the ratio of length to height. Modern reference material was obtained from all seven anadromous Oncorhynchus species native to the west coast of North America. A minimum of ten adult Chinook (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha), chum (Oncorhynchus keta), coho (Oncorhynchus kisutch), pink (Oncorhynchus gorbuscha), and sockeye salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka) and cutthroat (Oncorhynchus clarki clarki) and steelhead trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) were skeletonized and vertebra length and height were measured. Morphometric analyses compared species classification success based on Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), Classification and Regression Trees (CART), and randomForest, with CART performing the best. Classification analyses used all seven species individually, but because of considerable overlap among several species we also conducted analyses on four species groupings. We assigned Chinook salmon and cutthroat to their own groups based on their dissimilarities from each other and the other species. The remaining species were divided into two group complexes (a) chum, coho, and steelhead; and (b) pink and sockeye. When we grouped species according to similar morphology, CART overall success rates increased, ranging from 92 to 100%. Individual species with the highest successful classification rates using CART were Chinook salmon and cutthroat, from 92 to 100%, respectively. We applied our classification to an assemblage of ancient (1000–3000 year old) salmonid vertebrae from the Swiftwater Rockshelters excavations on the upper Wenatchee River in Washington State, U.S.A.