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The Jökulsárlón is a fast-receding glacial lagoon situated at the head of the Breiòamerkurjökull glacier in Iceland on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean. One and a half kilometres long, the lagoon covers an area of 18 square kilometres. Partly covered by volcanic ash caused by ancient eruptions, the fragile icebergs of the Jökulsárlón appear as dissolving sculptural forms that have been carved by nature. Only 20 per cent of the icebergs can be seen above the water, the remaining volume scrapes the glacier floor
Almost everything you consume, from your weekly supermarket trip to the presents you order online, arrives by cargo ship. Shipping is the engine of the world economy, transporting eleven billion tonnes of goods each year. Despite the clear environmental crisis, shipping emissions have doubled since 1990 to more than one billion tonnes of CO2 – more than aviation, more than all of Germany, or even France, Britain, and Italy combined. As the shipping industry is forecast to grow threefold by 2050, full decarbonisation is urgent to limit catastrophic climate change. To understand whether there are any realistic alternatives to the polluting status quo of the container shipping industry, in 2020, Christiaan De Beukelaer spent 150 days as part of a sailing crew aboard the Avontuur, a century-old two-masted schooner fitted for cargo. This book recounts both this personal odyssey and the journey the shipping industry is embarking on to cut its carbon emissions. It shows that the Avontuur’s mission remains as crucial as ever: the shipping industry needs to cut its use of fossil fuels as soon as possible. Otherwise, we will face excessive global warming and the dire outcomes that will bring. The book explores our path to an uncertain future. It argues that shipping symbolises the kind of economy we’ve built: a gargantuan global machine that delivers the goods at an enormous environmental cost. Merely eliminating carbon emissions or improving efficiency won’t solve the underlying issue. If we can’t make shipping truly sustainable, we can’t solve the climate crisis.
, March 12, 2020, Atlantic Ocean Nothing of the sort has been accomplished today. The more productive we have collectively become, the more we work. I can’t fathom why. I believe we should embrace technology to save time – though not to be more productive, but to be idle. That, to me, is part of climate justice. Some indeed argue that being less productive, or at least not chasing productivity gains, is key to living within planetary boundaries. 6 I loathe the glorification of labour. I find myself far
decontextualised that it is capable of multiple and conflicted interpretations (the Gannet desk tidy). This chapter seeks to chart the ways in which slave-trade suppression in the Atlantic Ocean was represented in material culture, and the legacy of this commemoration for historical writing and public memory in the subsequent 200 years. It attempts to show how a partial, limited and
, haunted me. I think now of the title of a late poem by Ed Dorn, ‘The Deceased are the Travellers Among Us’, and as an extension of that provocative notion, a phrase from The Undiscovered Country by Carl Watkins, ‘The soul in purgatory was a traveller passing through, not a permanent resident.’2 Olson and Kerouac would argue over the implications of residence and mobility, the great American neurosis about the daunting scale of the place where they found themselves, between Atlantic Ocean and the always difficult but seductive draw of the West. I was fascinated by the
Christiaan De Beukelaer joins the schooner Avontuur in Tenerife as a researcher studying the potential of traditional wind-propelled ships to help decarbonise the shipping industry. He signs on as a trainee crew member, standing watch eight hours a day to sail the hundred-year old ship across the Atlantic Ocean to pick up cargo in the Caribbean and Central America.
The suppression of the Atlantic slave trade has puzzled nineteenth-century contemporaries and historians. The British Empire turned naval power and moral outrage against a branch of commerce it had done so much to promote. This book deals with the British Royal Navy's suppression of the Atlantic slave trade. It traces the political debates which framed policies for the British state's waning but unbroken commitment to slave-trade suppression. If protectionists failed to stop free trade and anti-coercionists failed to withdraw the cruisers, then they did both succeed in reshaping domestic debates to support labour coercion. The book examines details of the work of the navy's West Africa Squadron which have been passed over in earlier narrative accounts. The liberty afforded to the individuals who entered as apprentices into Sierra Leone cannot be clearly distinguished from the bonded labour awaiting them had their enslavers completed the voyage to the Americas. The experiences of sailors and Africans ashore and on ship often stand in contrast to contemporaneous representations of naval suppression. Comparison of the health of African and European sailors serving on the West Africa Station provides insight into the degree to which naval medicine was racialised. The book discusses the anti-slave trade squadron's wider, cultural significance, and its role in the shaping of geographical knowledge of West Africa. It charts the ways in which slave-trade suppression in the Atlantic Ocean was represented in material culture, and the legacy of this commemoration for historical writing and public memory in the subsequent 200 years.
offering little or no comfort to their troubled men or women, projecting the inner torments of their marginalised inhabitants. Often, too, the setting is foreign: Cuba ( Our Man in Havana ), the Far East ( Outcast ), Austria ( The Third Man ), Switzerland ( Climbing High ), North Africa ( The Way Ahead ), Spain ( The Running Man ), the Atlantic Ocean ( The Key ), shifting spaces that provide an appropriate background to
Avontuur to understand her mission. The century-old two-masted schooner transports cargo across the Atlantic Ocean using the wind. Before the marquis de Jouffroy d’Abbans tested the Pyroscaphe on July 15, 1783, the world’s first steam-powered ship, on the river Saône in France, every single vessel in the world used sails (or oars) for propulsion. Today, owing to a range of factors, including the low price and abundance of oil, very few sailing vessels carry cargo anymore. Sailing has become a form of sport rather
of its principal interwar associations: first, as a binding Anglo-American commitment to the Atlantic Ocean as a shared space of diplomatic-economic activity; and second, as a solidly liberal-democratic project. As a response to older understandings of the Atlantic, these thinkers called for the inclusion of markedly non-democratic countries, such as Spain, into the Atlantic order. They also made a strong case for the participation in the Atlantic project of countries that had no geographic connection whatsoever to the Atlantic Ocean: countries like Poland and