Põrkuvad „ilmamaad“ 17. sajandi Liivimaal / Clashing “Weatherlands” in 17th-century Livonia

Johannes Gutslaffi 1644. aastal ilmunud teos „Lühike teade ja õpetus“ ja selles sisalduv „pikse palve“ kuuluvad Eesti varauusaegsete tüvitekstide hulka. Lugedes seda keskkonnahumanitaaria vaatenurgast, saavad ilmsiks seni tähelepanuta jäänud kliimaajaloolised kihistused ja seosed. Artikkel väidab, et „Lühike teade ja õpetus“ on üks varasemaid siinmail ilmunud teoloogilisi käsitlusi ekstreemsetest ilmastikutingimustest 17. sajandil. Raamatus on kirjeldatud esimest teadaolevat ilmastikutingimustest põhjustatud mässu Balti ajaloos. Artikkel pakub seega esimesi tõlgendusi Balti nn „ilmamaade“ sügavamatest kihtidest ning analüüsib „kliimamässu“ tekkimise probleeme, kasutades selleks keskkonnahumanitaaria ja kliimaajaloo metoodikat. Summary Johannes Gutslaff’s Kurtzer Bericht und Unterricht Von der Falsch-heilig genandten Bäche in Lieffland Wöhhanda ('Short Report and Lesson on the Võhandu River, Wrongly Regarded as Sacred in Livonia') that was printed in 1644, and  the “Thunder prayer” included in it belong to the main corpus of Early Modern texts in Estonia. Hitherto, this material has been interpreted mostly from the perspective of cultural history. Reading the text from an environmental humanities perspective, we claim that so far unrecognised layers and connections to climate history can be found in it: the book and can be read as a scholarly piece about changing climate conditions and their different interpretations. Kurtzer Bericht belongs among Baltic theological reflections written in German about the extreme weather in the 17th century, which was marked globally by rapidly worsening climatic conditions and social unrest caused by these. In Gutslaff’s book we can also find a detailed description of the first climate-caused uprising in Baltic history known so far. In the Early Modern period, or during the peak of the “Little Ice Age”, the Baltic region, similarly to the rest of the world, was affected by a wider trend of cooling, with extreme fluctuations of temperature and precipitation proving to be the biggest problem for peasants growing crops. A look at climate history, however, makes it clear that cultural or social reactions need not be linked to particularly extreme weather phenomena, as they can culminate and explode at a favourable later moment. Climate does not dictate cultural behaviour, but the latter’s interweaving with climate needs to be studied more broadly on the basis of the existing regional sources.             When looking for traces concerning climate in Baltic German religious literature, we can contextualise Gutslaff’s text as belonging to Early Modern “weatherlands” (Tim Ingold) that transgress cultural and regional borders. The article offers first interpretations of the clashing Baltic early modern “weatherlands”, combining methods deriving from literary scholarship, environmental humanities and climate history. The interconnectedness of climate and culture makes it possible to see the challenges climate change poses to culture and social order. Thus weather can be a mirror of relationships and a “moral barometer” of society that can measure not only the state of relations between God and people or society, but also the tensions between people. According to such an interpretation, weather plays almost as significant a role in religious thinking as do measuring instruments in secular science. As weather phenomena are loaded with different societal and religious meanings, explosive conflicts can emerge in climatically extreme times, showing the tension between different layers of society. Conflicts around weather and climate can therefore be seen as inevitable in periods of climatic challenges.             Johann Gutslaff's Kurzer Bericht is placed among the theological-meteorological literature that had spread across Europe and can be traced back to the Antiquity and the Bible. As phenomena related to vernacular religion are of a cross-ethnic nature and with migratory motivations, it is no wonder that the rebellion by the Võhandu was not limited to ethnically Estonian peasants, but linked representatives of different linguistic and social layers. It can be noticed that in interpreting the events Gutslaff attempted to attribute the power and competence to change the weather only to God, and the ability to react to the weather changes only to upper classes – the agency of peasants in reacting to climatic extremes was not taken seriously. They were left alone with their concerns caused by climate change due to the lack of a societal process of addressing climate fears. It was from here that the potential for the conflict that exploded on the banks of the Võhandu derived. The article shows that combined analysis of historical, cultural and natural sources that was started in Estonia about half a century ago, but has been forgotten due to the complexity of the phenomenon and for ideological reasons, is needed to explain the connection between climate and culture.   &nbsp

Loodusmõttest aktivismini: saateks keskkondluse erinumbrile / From Nature Contemplation to Activism: A Special Issue on Environmentalism: Saateks keskkondluse erinumbrile / A Special Issue on Environmentalism

The introduction to the special issue of Methis on Estonian environmentalism provides an overview of the phenomenon of environmentalism and its spread across political periods, economic formations, and regions. The essay starts by contextualising the central concepts of the issue, ‘environmentalism’ and its possible translation into Estonian as ‘keskkondlus’, and its relationship with the concept of ‘nature’. At the end of the 1980s, amidst a deepening awareness of environmental crisis, some authors announced ‘nature’ to have met its end. While this end has become widely accepted within environmental discourse, the approach clashes with the traditional thinking about the beauty of nature and its strong bonds with national identities. To foster discussion and to bridge the discursive and ideological gap between the two perceptions, the authors of the articles use the concept as an umbrella term for both paradigms. The second part of the introductory article discusses East European environmentalism, drawing attention to the research into erroneous assumptions regarding the lack of environmental activism within the Soviet Union. Before its brief heyday in the 1980s, East European environmentalism was hidden within economy, policy, society and culture. However, its roots went deeper, reaching back to 18th- and 19th-century thought, to Baltic German – and later Estonian – early voluntary associations and the value seen in the homeland and its natural objects. The founding of animal and nature protection societies in the late 19th century was an early practical outcome, and similar thought became pronounced in print culture. In early 20th century, several nature protection areas were established, and people became avid consumers of popular science journals – an interest that would continue throughout the Soviet period. The 1970s saw an environmental movement to protect the wetlands of Estonia which were in danger of being drained. Throughout the 20th century, also fiction reflected the prevailing views of nature and emerging concerns about the environment. The issue’s opening article by Ulrike Plath and Kaarel Vanamölder takes us back to the 17th century to demonstrate the possibility of climate movements more than three centuries ago. This is followed by Karl Hein’s case study that depicts in detail the emergence of animal protection in Estonia a hundred years ago in the context of local and regional history. The next four articles focus on different aspects of environmental movements in the Soviet period. Elle-Mari Talivee retells the story of the peculiar character of Atom-Boy created by the childrens’ author Vladimir Beekman who depicts in this form the various developments in the Soviet nuclear industry. This example from children’s literature is paralleled by similar environmental concerns expressed in visual arts, as outlined in Linda Kaljundi’s article. In a more theoretical take on liberal and autocratic environmental protection, Viktor Pál discusses the Soviet propagandistic use of environmental issues. Olev Liivik contextualises the protests against phosphorite mining in the 1970–80s within the wider trends in the Soviet Union, including the practice of sending letters of complaint to the media, and the various waves of environmental dissent. The discussion of a more compact case of the so-called Green Cycling Tours by Tambet Muide demonstrates the same increasingly oppositional stance that took hold in the 1980s. Regarding the post-Soviet era, Tõnno Jonuks, Lona Päll, Atko Remmel and Ulla Kadakas analyse the various conflicts that have emerged around natural and cultural objects protected by law since the 1990s. In the freestanding article of the issue, Raili Lass writes on interlinguistic and intersemiotic procedures of translation in the theatre but, as our introductory essay suggests, points of convergence may be found here with the discussion of staging of conflicts in environmental protection.  In the “Theory in Translation” section Timothy Morton’s classic discussion of environmentalism is published in Ene-Reet Soovik’s translation, accompanied by introductory remarks from the translator and Kadri Tüür. The final part of the issue’s introduction offers a comparative and interdisciplinary take on the themes discussed. The revelatory nature of historical events of any era, especially natural disasters or the conditions of their unfolding, uncovers the socio-environmental relations that push people to respond. Whether or not such responses become environmental movements depends on the context that either recognises or ignores human embeddedness in the environment. Searching for such parallels connects 21st century climate activism and 17th century upheavals, animal protection in the 1920s and a hundred years later. The Soviet period allows a simultaneous scrutiny of both the limited and ideological take on the apparent lack of Soviet environmentalism as well as the methodological challenges of finding the footprints of hidden awareness and activism. Unearthing this from literature, art and the restrained presence of expert voices also provides an explanation to the sudden explosion of activism in the 1980s. The silence of the next decades further proves that there is nothing obvious in the ways in which environmentalism can take hold of society, which demands precise and detailed inquiry such as provided by the authors of this special issue

Different Roles for Honey Bee Mushroom Bodies and Central Complex in Visual Learning of Colored Lights in an Aversive Conditioning Assay

The honey bee is an excellent visual learner, but we know little about how and why it performs so well, or how visual information is learned by the bee brain. Here we examined the different roles of two key integrative regions of the brain in visual learning: the mushroom bodies and the central complex. We tested bees' learning performance in a new assay of color learning that used electric shock as punishment. In this assay a light field was paired with electric shock. The other half of the conditioning chamber was illuminated with light of a different wavelength and not paired with shocks. The unrestrained bee could run away from the light stimulus and thereby associate one wavelength with punishment, and the other with safety. We compared learning performance of bees in which either the central complex or mushroom bodies had been transiently inactivated by microinjection of the reversible anesthetic procaine. Control bees learned to escape the shock-paired light field and to spend more time in the safe light field after a few trials. When ventral lobe neurons of the mushroom bodies were silenced, bees were no longer able to associate one light field with shock. By contrast, silencing of one collar region of the mushroom body calyx did not alter behavior in the learning assay in comparison to control treatment. Bees with silenced central complex neurons did not leave the shock-paired light field in the middle trials of training, even after a few seconds of being shocked. We discussed how mushroom bodies and the central complex both contribute to aversive visual learning with an operant component

Sicherheitspolitik und Bundeswehr im Schulunterricht

'Die in Rahmenrichtlinien, Lehrplaenen und Runderlassen konkretisierten Unterrichtsvorgaben der Kultusministerien aller 16 Bundeslaender werden in einer umfassenden Bestandsaufnahme analysiert und - darueber hinaus - alle zugelassenen Sozialkundebuecher mit sicherheitspolitischen Inhalten unter quantitativen und qualitativen Aspekten auf ihren fachlichen Gehalt in Bezug auf allgemeine Sicherheitspolitik und Bundeswehr hin ueberprueft. Im Vordergrund steht dabei - neben inhaltlichen und didaktischen Kriterien -insbesondere das Kriterium der Aktualitaet, das darueber Aufschluss geben soll, ob und inwieweit die gueltigen Unterrichtsvorgaben und -buecher die umwaelzenden sicherheitspolitischen Veraenderungen zu Beginn dieses Jahrzehnts bereits ausreichend reflektieren. Der Untersuchungsrahmen beschraenkt sich somit auf die deskriptive und analytische Bestandsaufnahme der Unterrichtsvorgaben zu den genannten Themen sowie der zur Unterrichtsdurchfuehrung empfohlenen Fachbuecher. Nicht untersucht wurde hingegen die tatsaechliche Umsetzung der ministeriellen Vorgaben im konkreten Schulalltag. Diese an sich wuenschenswerte 'Wirkungsanalyse' muss aus Zeit- und Aktualitaetsgruenden aber auch mit Blick auf die Komplexitaet der damit verbundenen Fragestellungen einem gesonderten Forschungsprojekt vorbehalten bleiben. Trotz dieser Eingrenzung des wissenschaftlichen Untersuchungsgegenstandes enthaelt die vorliegende Analyse wichtige Hinweise zum aktuellen Stellenwert von Sicherheitspolitik und Bundeswehr im Schulunterricht, sie zeigt Handlungsbedarf auf und schliesst mit konstruktiven Empfehlungen, wie die aufgezeigten Defizite behoben werden koennen. Der besondere Wert der Untersuchung liegt jedoch auch in ihrem Beitrag zur Versachlichung der Diskussion, in welcher Weise und in welchem Umfang diese Themen im Schulunterricht behandelt werden sollten.' (Autorenreferat)Available from UuStB Koeln(38)-970106564 / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekSIGLEDEGerman

Different Roles for Honey Bee Mushroom Bodies and Central Complex in Visual Learning of Colored Lights in an Aversive Conditioning Assay

The honey bee is an excellent visual learner, but we know little about how and why it performs so well, or how visual information is learned by the bee brain. Here we examined the different roles of two key integrative regions of the brain in visual learning: the mushroom bodies and the central complex. We tested bees' learning performance in a new assay of color learning that used electric shock as punishment. In this assay a light field was paired with electric shock. The other half of the conditioning chamber was illuminated with light of a different wavelength and not paired with shocks. The unrestrained bee could run away from the light stimulus and thereby associate one wavelength with punishment, and the other with safety. We compared learning performance of bees in which either the central complex or mushroom bodies had been transiently inactivated by microinjection of the reversible anesthetic procaine. Control bees learned to escape the shock-paired light field and to spend more time in the safe light field after a few trials. When ventral lobe neurons of the mushroom bodies were silenced, bees were no longer able to associate one light field with shock. By contrast, silencing of one collar region of the mushroom body calyx did not alter behavior in the learning assay in comparison to control treatment. Bees with silenced central complex neurons did not leave the shock-paired light field in the middle trials of training, even after a few seconds of being shocked. We discussed how mushroom bodies and the central complex both contribute to aversive visual learning with an operant component.publishe

Modulation of thalamo-cortical activity by the NMDA receptor antagonists ketamine and phencyclidine in the awake freely-moving rat

Non-competitive N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor antagonists mimic schizophrenia symptoms and produce immediate and persistent antidepressant effects. We investigated the effects of ketamine and phencyclidine (PCP) on thalamo-cortical network activity in awake, freely-moving male Wistar rats to gain new insight into the neuronal populations and brain circuits involved in the effects of NMDA-R antagonists. Single unit and local field potential (LFP) recordings were conducted in mediodorsal/centromedial thalamus and in medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) using microelectrode arrays. Ketamine and PCP moderately increased the discharge rates of principal neurons in both areas while not attenuating the discharge of mPFC GABAergic interneurons. They also strongly affected LFP activity, reducing beta power and increasing that of gamma and high-frequency oscillation bands. These effects were short-lasting following the rapid pharmacokinetic profile of the drugs, and consequently were not present at 24 h after ketamine administration. The temporal profile of both drugs was remarkably different, with ketamine effects peaking earlier than PCP effects. Although this study is compatible with the glutamate hypothesis for fast-acting antidepressant action, it does not support a local disinhibition mechanism as the source for the increased pyramidal neuron activity in mPFC. The short-lasting increase in thalamo-cortical activity is likely associated with the rapid psychotomimetic action of both agents but could also be part of a cascade of events ultimately leading to the persistent antidepressant effects of ketamine. Changes in spectral contents of high-frequency bands by the drugs show potential as translational biomarkers for target engagement of NMDA-R modulators.The work leading to these results has received funding from Lundbeck A/S, the Innovation Fund Denmark and SAF2015-68346-P (Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, co-financed by European Regional Development Fund (ERDF)) and PI12/00156 and PI16/00287 Instituto de Salud Carlos III, co-financed by European Regional Development Fund (ERDF)). Support from the Centro de Investigación Biomédica en Red de Salud Mental (CIBERSAM) and Generalitat de Catalunya Grup de Recerca Consolidat, 2017SGR717 is also acknowledged. Ulrike Richter is funded by Sweden's Innovation Agency VINNOVA