Bushfires,Human Health Economics,and Pyrogeography

Bushfires (landscape fires) are a key Earth system process that affects humans and our societies and economies. In a recent article, we explored the coupling of humans to landscape fire through the lens of human health impacts of bushfire smoke. We noted that such an approach demands recognition of the indirect impacts and costs of bushfires that cannot be captured by simplistic proxies such as deaths directly attributable to a fire front. Evaluation of direct and indirect economic costs of bushfire disasters, and bushfire fire management remains a poorly developed research frontier that demands collaboration of expertise from a broad cross‐section of fields that often have limited experience of collaborating together. The need for such synthetic thinking about fire's place on Earth has spawned the discipline of pyrogeography.     

WHO AND WHY IN PALAEOLITHIC ART

Summary. No consideration has ever been given to the possibility that women may have had a part in the execution of European Upper Palaeolithic art; however, an examination of the history of research in this field suggests that preconceptions, prejudice, and the acceptance of unproved theories have perhaps been responsible for the view that it was a male-only activity.
Some of its so-called 'religious' aspects are reconsidered, and re-explained from a female perspective in the light of an experimental attempt to reproduce Palaeolithic plaques with superimpositions. The results of this experiment suggest that Palaeolithic art may well have been multipurpose, at least some being illustrative and part of a general visual communication system — perhaps a forerunner of written communication. It seems probable that all members of society, especially women, were involved.     

Flexing Femininity: Female body-builders refiguring 'the body'

This paper considers the built bodies of female body-builders and their training environments. Empirical findings suggest that place of training provides a material and discursive environment that reworks bodies in the feminine/masculine binary. However, the female body-builder works her body within this binary as well as beyond the acceptable feminine/masculine dualism. Three possible, non-exclusive, readings of female body-builders are offered. I argue that the specific materiality of female muscled (built) bodies provides the ground for contestation of the feminine/masculine binary as well as other binaries such as nature/culture, body/mind and sex/gender, thereby opening up new spaces to reconceptualise sexed bodies in geography. The ontological and socio-political status of female body-builders demands a refiguring of sexual difference.