Feigenblatt oder Katalysator?

Der in der Finanzwelt angesehene Hochschullehrer Henner Schierenbeck schrieb 1992 gemeinsam mit Eberhard Seidel über die Bedeutung von alternativen Banken: "Ihre eigentliche Funktion liegt darin, als 'Katalysator des Wandels' zu wirken. Öko-Banken bieten Anregungen, fungieren in der Rolle des Vorreiters und Pioniers. Auf diese Weise können sie die ökologische Orientierung der Universalbanken beschleunigen". Sieben Jahre später lohnt es zu fragen, inwiefern die alternativen Banken diese Funktion erfüllen

A Non-Narratable Future?: Narrating Climate Change in Contemporary Fiction

Whenever one encounters theoretical discussions about contemporary climate change narratives, one word that is likely to appear is ‘crisis’: the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh, himself expressly concerned with the representation of climate change in his writing, has argued that “the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination” (2016, 9). This essay seeks to attempt a narratological-cum-ecocritical assessment of where the crisis of climate change’s cultural representation may reside; it will, at the same time, discuss select narrative texts that have made climate change their subject, namely Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007), Ian McEwan’s Solar (2010), and Jonathan Franzen’s The End of the End of the Earth (2018). It will also evaluate strategies of narration that may be more suited to capture the complexity and uncertainty of our planet’s future, such as the multi-linear, open-ended ‘future narrative’ (cf. Bode / Dietrich 2013; Meifert-Menhard 2013), arguing that narrative negotiations of climate change must adapt to the new historical and cultural conditions this phenomenon entails in order to avoid restrictive representations of what is, in fact, a hyperdimensional, open-ended, and multi-linear temporal development

Playing the Text, Performing the Future: Future Narratives in Print and Digiture

This volume examines the structure of text-based Future Narratives in the widest sense, including choose-your-own-adventure books, forking-path novels, combinatorial literature, hypertexts, interactive fiction, and alternate reality games. How ´radical` can printed Future Narratives really be, given the constraints of their media? When exactly do they not only play with the mere idea of multiple continuations, but actually stage genuine openness and potentiality? Process-rather than product-oriented, text-based Future Narratives are seen as performative and contingent systems, simulating their own emergence

Visual and olfactory enhancement of stable fly trapping

BACKGROUND: Stable flies are considered to be one of the major blood-feeding pests in the US livestock industry, causing losses running into billions of dollars annually. Adult stable flies are highly attracted to Alsynite traps; however, Alsynite is becoming increasingly difficult to obtain and is expensive. RESULTS: Here, we report on the development of a less expensive and more efficacious trap based upon a white panel with the option to add visual and olfactory stimuli for enhanced stable fly trapping. White panel traps caught twice as many stable flies than Alsynite traps. Baiting the traps with synthetic manure volatiles increased catches 2–3-fold. Electroretinographic recordings of stable flies showed strong peaks of visual sensitivities occurring at 330–360 nm, 460–525 nm and 605–635 nm. A laboratory study indicated that young stable flies are more responsive to white,whereas gravid females prefer blue; in the field, white traps caught more stable flies than patterned or blue-black traps. CONCLUSION: Stable fly control can be enhanced by developing more efficient trapping systems with added visual and olfactory stimuli