Archiv der Kategorie: Blog

Jadaliyya’s new Environment page

There is finally a site for environmental questions on the Middle East: On Earth Day, April 22, Jadaliyya, e-zine of the Arab Studies Institute, has launched its Environment page.

The Jadaliyya Environment Page is a forum for innovative, critical, and incisive analysis and reporting on environmental questions in the Middle East. It invites contributors and readers to rethink these questions by taking a broad stance on what counts as an environmental issue. Whereas environmental questions in the Middle East are usually framed in terms the security of water or oil, this page purposefully seeks out a wide array of sources and perspectives in examining important environmental issues on the ground and across the region. As curators of this Jadaliyya project, we want to provide a platform that brings together diverse perspectives including, and especially, from those living in the region, indigenous voices, and grassroots approaches.

The launch page features, among others, articles on Smallpox in Monarchiq Iraq, a wind energy project in the Syrian Golan Heights and environmental racism in Palestine – the general picture, that Israel and Palestine are the sites where most research on environmental issues (from a social science perspective) is undertaken – is apparent here too. But as the new page is calling for more contributions, the geographic and temporal perspective might become wider.

Like on other issues, Jadaliyya is offering a Media Roundup with recently published news articles on environmental issues from the region now, an Essential reading list with important contributions in the field, and aditionally two podcasts – one on green islamic finance and an interview with the editors about their aims for the new page.

Flying in Academia and the climate crisis I

Since almost a year students are demonstrating every Friday for actions adressing global warming. This has led to the creation of new networks, like Scientists for Future (S4F), supporting this movement, but also to new discussion within academia about our  own climate impact.

CO2 emmissions are directly related to income, and those working in acadamia certainly belong to the ones flying much more than the average employee. Especially those who are working in an international research environment, conferences taking place in Italy, in China, the USA, Australia, will often fly overseas just to hold a talk or attend a conference. Longtime, this was not really questioned, on the contrary many universities encouraged their staff to present and travel abroad, to foster the ‘internationalization’ of the university. Even universities who praise themselves as eco-friendyl or even carbon neutral, like the university of Lüneburg, often excluded the flights of their staff from their calculations, or, simply ‘neutralized’ them with buying offsets (a method that, as many studies have shown, is not just not working, but also has deteriorating effects in countries of the global south – apart from being part highly problematic in term of environmental justice). 

Flying in Academia and the climate crisis I weiterlesen