Search results for "Environmental ethics"

Popular Music and the Anthropocene

2020

International audience; We are at a major turning point, probably irreversible for thousands of years. Despite the continued use of slogans like ‘Save the Planet’, it is living beings, more than the Earth (which has already seen many upheavals) who are threatened with extinction. Although the proponents of the term Anthropocene agree that human activities have become a force that is influencing the geological course of the Earth, and stratigraphers are already finding traces of that process in rocks and sediments (Zalasiewicz 2010), we can however identify two contrasting narratives about the Anthropocene.

Phytotoponymy and Synphytotoponymy in Western Granada Province (Andalusia, Spain)

2009

En el marco de la investigación etnobotánica desarrollada en el poniente granadino, se ha realizado un estudio sobre la toponimia de la comarca con atención a los apelativos de origen vegetal (fitotopónimos y sinfitotopónimos). La información —obtenida de la Gerencia Territorial del Catastro de Granada, de la Junta de Andalucía y de nuestro trabajo de campo— se ha incluido en una base de datos con el programa Microsoft Excell®. Un total de 98 especies vegetales se encuentran representadas en la toponimia local, dando nombre a 593 lugares del territorio. Se aportan comentarios sobre el significado ecológico, paleofitogeográfico y etnobotánico de las especies reflejadas en la toponimia.

Local, Natural, Authentic: New Nordic Cuisine as Economic Trend and Cultural Resistance

2020

Bullfighting: The Legal Protection of Suffering

2018

Bullfighting has been recently accepted as Cultural Heritage by the Spanish Government. There is a current initiative to declare bullfighting as Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) and include it in the UNESCO list. The proponents of such initiatives contend that bullfighting should be protected and promoted on the grounds that it is an artistic activity, part of the national culture. In this chapter, I discuss the moral arguments and legal aspects that can be pitted against such a cruel practice. More specifically, I will examine the serious obstacles to the legal protection of such practices, which cause suffering and aim at killing nonhuman animals based on cultural or artistic reasons.

Biotechnology and Cultural Heritage Conservation

2020

The deterioration of cultural asset is induced by biological, chemical, and physical factors, influenced by anthropogenic activity and environmental conditions. In this study, the contribution of biotechnology is emphasized to define the conservation strategy, for a marble Fountain (Two Dragons, XV century) located in Palermo city center, based on an integrated approach and eco-friendly procedures. Biotechnological protocols are preliminarily applied as an integrated approach, based on microscopy observation, in vitro culture and genomic DNA analysis to recognize and characterize microbial communities. Several biological systems have been identified: green algae (Chlorella) and cyanobacteri…

Arsenical Pesticides in Early Francoist Spain: Fascism, Autarky, Agricultural Engineers and the Invisibility of Toxic Risks

2019

Abstract Lead arsenate was introduced on a massive scale in agriculture in Spain in the early 1940s. With the support of a network of agricultural engineers, the new Francoist state encouraged the production and use of lead arsenate as the main weapon against a newly arrived pest, the Colorado potato beetle. In this paper I discuss arsenical pesticides as sociotechnological products which played a pivotal role in the joint production of both chemical-based agriculture and the emerging Francoist regime in Spain during the 1940s. I review the campaigns organized by agriculture engineers and the making of the new National Register for Phytosanitary Products in 1942. The new regulations promote…

Tourism as a Form of New Psychological Resilience: The Inception of Dark Tourism

2012

Tourism industry is considered as an activity based on higher tolerance to frustration, in other terms as a resilient industry. At some extent, the diverse threats that impinge on tourism in late modernity not only did not alter its logic, but strengthened its presence worldwide. Concepts as dark tourism or thanatourism started to be adopted and applied in tourism-related research. Nonetheless, these studies are not interested in revealing neither the anthropological roots of the issue nor the representation of founding trauma (as sacralisation of the dead). Natural and made-man disasters give lessons to communities that are rechanneled by means of mythical mechanism of resiliency. Tourism,…

Research Methods in Dark Tourism Fields

2018

The current chapter delves into the methodologies as well as limitations of used method in dark tourism fields. As fieldworkers are familiar, sometimes interviewees not only are incognizant of their inner-world, but in other occasion, they simply do not say the truth to protect their own interests. Though in tourism and dark tourism fields, researchers are prone to administer questionnaires or interviews as the main methodological option, no less true is that results are far from being clear or have very problems to be organized in an all-encompassing model.

Dark Tourism Tribes: Social Capital as a Variable

2020

There is a recent morbid tendency to consume (gaze) sites of mass death, mourning and suffering. This tendency was baptized in different forms such as dark tourism, thana-tourism or mourning tourism to name only a few. To date, no matter the multiplication of theories and studies, two great tendencies coexist. On one hand, some voices allude to the dark tourism as a mechanism of reisilience which helps community to recover after a disaster takes hit. The other signals to the pedagogical functions of dark tourism as a fertile ground to develop empathy with the Other’s pain. The present chapter reviews the strengths and weaknesses of both position with strong focus on the cultures of neo-trib…

Heritage and knowledge: apparatus, logic and strategies in the formation of heritage

2016

Heritage as a category reflects diverse political positions. All heritagisation processes imply the creation of hierarchies, selection, ranking, and categorization of what is worthy or unworthy of being heritage, and all heritage creation involves certain disciplinary processes that confer legitimacy. As a modern invention, heritage was built on two closely-related cornerstones: the distinction between nature and culture and the difference between normalized knowledge and marginal knowledge. As a result, refining processes were applied which became strategies to legitimise political domination. In this paper the constituent process of heritage creation and its links to normative knowledge a…