Friday, May 29, 2015

Fieldnotes from an emerging climate change landscape

Foto by Martin Mahony
Localizing climate change means more than downscaling regional climate change from global climate models; it means figuring out how climate change becomes part and parcel of the landscapes we actually inhabit. How do people shape their environment in permanently changing atmospheric conditions? Recently, my British colleagues Martin Mahony and Helen Pallett joined us on a trip to my favorite field-site, the Hamburger Hallig. On their excellent blog 'The Topograph', Martin wrote a nice piece about this excursion; his fieldnotes illustrate the dynamics of this emerging energy landscape, with climate change as the most recent episode in a long history of interactions between people and their extreme environment.  While in Paris once more the future of the planet will be at stake, in Northern Friesland we can already identify some of the culturally specific ways how people actually deal with the challenge of a changing climate. Enjoy reading a geographer's take on the Wadden Sea landscape!

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