Venice and its environment are perceived to be in peril due to rising sea levels, tourism, and modern development. Are these threats myths or reality? This book explores Venice's environmental risks based on interviews with Venetian environmental campaigners and draws on the mythology of the Venetian Republic. Campaigners' opinions about the mobile dams nearing completion to protect the city reveal that Venice now represents an environmentally-threatened retreat from modernity. This reputation has been established as sustainable development and climate change policies have risen to the top of political agendas in many cities and countries. The book investigates how environmentalism has been transformed from a theory underpinning counter-cultural movements to part of a dominant holistic culture in Western societies. Rather than constraining Venice in search of a mythical harmony with nature, this book offers a ten-point proposal to modernize the city while preserving its ancient heritage.

A technical volume exploring the prospects for decreasing the level of flooding in and around Venice.

One of the most famous literary works of the 20th century, the novella “Death in Venice” embodies themes that preoccupied Thomas Mann (1875–1955) in much of his work; the duality of art and life, the presence of death and disintegration in the midst of existence, the connection between love and suffering, and the conflict between the artist and his inner self. Mann’s handling of these concerns in this story of a middle-aged German writer, torn by his passion for a Polish youth met on holiday in Venice, resulted in a work of great psychological intensity and tragic power.

Venice is sinking - six feet over the past 1,000 years. The reasons for this are many. Although there is a natural geologic tendency for some sinking, humans have exacerbated the problem by exploiting on a massive scale underground water resources for industrial purposes. Coupled with these events - and perhaps most significant - are climatic changes all over the globe. The heating of the atmosphere after the last ice age, dramatically speeded up by humans, has led to a steady, continuing rise in sea level. This global warming is likely to persist beyond human control for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Venetians, other Italians, and many in the world community are locked in debate over Venice's plight. Venice Against the Sea explains how the city and its 177 canals were built and what has led up to this long-foreseen crisis. It explores the various options currently being considered for "solving" this problem and chronicles the ongoing debate among scientists, engineers, and politicians about the pros and cons of each potential solution. Through extensive research and interviews, award-winning journalist John Keahey has written the definitive book on this fascinating problem. No matter what the experts decide to do, one thing is for certain - Venice's art, its buildings, and its history are too important to the planet's cultural identity to let it slip beneath the rising waters of the Adriatic.

Earthly Engagements: Reading Sartre after the Holocene brings together scholars from the Sartre studies community to think through the planetary ecological crisis. Edited by Matthew C. Ally and Damon Boria, the collection explores ways in which Sartre’s existential thought can be read socio-ecologically, illuminating the tightly imbricated earthly and worldly crises of our post-Holocene epoch. Contributors variously discuss phenomenology, ethics, politics, ontology, and metaphysics. Earthly locations include the Icelandic coast, the Minnesota woods, the Indiana Dunes, the Chinese Great Plain, the Venetian Lagoon, and more; worldly situations include that of the artist, the activist, the consumer, the tourist, and more. Through their diversity of methods and substantive concerns, the chapters reveal a wealth of critical and heuristic resources within Sartre’s thought for thinking through and engaging the planetary ecological crisis and its direct ties to global social, economic, and political crises. In full recognition of Sartre’s personal distaste for agrarian settings and wilderness, and some ostensibly anti-environmental philosophical and literary moments, the contributors take the proper Sartrean line that how we view nature and our relationship to nature is neither closed nor predetermined. Like life itself, our worldly relationship to earthly nature is rooted in the sufficiency and open-endedness of freedom.

A beautiful and memorable look at some of the most gorgeous endangered places on the planet. Machu Picchu is a mesmerizing, ancient Incan city tucked away in the mountains of Peru, but it is rapidly being worn down by the thousands of feet treading across its stones. Glacier National Park is a destination long known for the stunning beauty of its ice floes, but in our lifetimes it will have no glaciers due to global warming. In the biobays of Puerto Rico swimmers can float in a sea shimmering with bioluminescent life, but sediment being churned up by development is killing the dinoflagellates that produce the eerie and beautiful glow. And in the Congo Basin of Africa, where great apes roam freely in lush, verdant rainforests, logging is quickly destroying the vast life-giving canopies. These places-along with many others across the globe-are changing as we speak due to global warming, environmental degradation, overuse, and natural causes. From the Boreal Forests in Finland to the Yangtze River Valley in China, 37 Places to See Before They Disappear is a treasure trove of geographic wonder, and a guide to these threatened destinations and what is being done to save them.

This book explores reactions to and representations of natural disasters in early modern Europe. The contributors illustrate how the cultural production of the period - in manuals, treatises, sermons, travelogues and fiction - grappled with environmental catastrophe. Crucially, they interrogate how people in the early modern era rationalized and mediated the threat of events like plagues, great frosts, storms, floods and earthquakes. A vital contribution to environmental history, this book highlights the parallels between early modern responses to natural disaster and climate anxiety in our own era.