lexicon

Umweltbildung / Umweltbewusstsein / Umwelterziehung environmental education / environmental consciousness / environmental pedagogy

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Umweltbildung deals with the environment and its value as a foundation for the life of human beings with each other. It presumes reciprocal relationships at its center and thus attempts to get from the acquisition of a basic environment-related knowledge to an understanding for eco-social connections in a value-based manner.i This education fosters competences to […]

Umwelt / Natur / Mitwelt / Nachhaltigkeit environment / nature / common world / sustainability

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Natur and Umwelt are highly contested terms in German history and criticism, with both having numerous meanings, often being used interchangeably in daily and political life, and causing difficulty to then interpret environmental texts. Umwelt (translated as environment, most of the time) is usually used to describe the conditions of life surrounding human beings, for […]

Umweltschutz / Naturschutz / Klimaschutz environmental protection / nature protection / climate protection

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Nachhaltigkeit (sustainability) itself is not the same as Umweltschutz (environmental protection), as Umweltschutz is a vital aspect of sustainability but more diverse. Sustainable development is a development that meets today’s generations needs without endangering the potential of future generations (UN World Commission for Environment and Development, 1987). It often comes down to a compromise between […]

ökologische Rucksack / ökologische Fußabdruck ecological backpack, ecological rucksack, environmental backpack / ecological footprint

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While the concept of an ecological backpack in German writing often tends to be equated into the English calculation of the ‘ecological footprint’, these are two different yet related concepts. The ecological footprint is calculated based on the theoretical territorial or geographical needs for a product or service and thus based on a footprint in […]

effondrement / collapsologie collapse / collapsology

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The neologism collapsologie first entered the public discourse in France in 2015 with the publication of Comment tout peut s’effondrer? Petit manuel de collapsologie à l’usage des générations présentes. Co-authors Pablo Servigne, an agronomist and biologist by training, and Raphaël Stevens, an independent researcher and eco-adviser, aimed at ‘giv[ing] meaning to events’, intensifying social ‘crises’, […]

Zone à défendre / zad zone to defend

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‘We are not defending nature, we are nature defending itself’: from Indigenous-led environmental justice action to Extinction Rebellion, this sentence resonates as a mission statement for activists for whom human beings are not at the centre of, not apart from, but a part of the environment, and who rise and fight against the ecocidal colonial-capitalist […]

Terre land, earth, soil

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Nous nous soulevons, chacun.e depuis notre endroit, chacun.e à notre manière. Le mouvement des Soulèvements de la Terre ne peut pas être dissout car il est multiple et vivant. On ne dissout pas un mouvement, on ne dissout pas une révolte. We are rising, each from their own place, each in their own way. The […]

hors-sol aboveground, outside the soil

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Factory farming must end. This is the message and aim of the Brittany-based collective against factory farms and for a territorialised agriculture. The collective was formed in 2021, shortly after the legal victory against the plan to build an industrial chicken coop to breed 120 000 chickens in Langoëlan, and at a stage where the […]

Plougoñ / Plogoff

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Plougoñ / Plogoff: the name of this commune in the Penn-ar-bed / Finistère department in northwestern Brittany has become a symbol of the anti-nuclear struggle and an important reference in Brittany as the emblematic struggle of ‘des pierres contre des fusils’ [stones against rifles], as encapsulated in the title of Nicole Le Garrec’s 1980 documentary […]

Biophilia (Erich Fromm)

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Why is it that, despite better knowledge, we have not been able to make the behavioral and political changes needed to avoid the unfolding ecological disaster? What in our personal and collective psyches makes us unable or even unwilling to do so? A pioneer with good answers was German-American psychoanalyst and social theorist Erich Fromm […]