Popular science

“The way people act when confronted with environmental problems is evidently connected to how they think about them, and in my view, the aspect of human–environment interaction is underestimated in Latvia. This interaction is not only material or economic; it also has highly significant ideational, ideological, cultural, and social dimensions. Addressing environmental problems is therefore not only a matter of governance (how to manage them), but also a question of how to change people’s ways of thinking so that they genuinely want to address these problems.

In the contemporary academic environment, these issues are addressed by the environmental humanities and the social sciences, and in recent years the topic of water has become one of the central ones. These include questions of the equitable distribution of water resources and the ethics of water use; the history of human–water interactions, including histories of protection; forms and practices of experiencing water (such as swimming and boating); representations of water in culture (literature, painting, folk songs); understandings of what water, a lake, or a river should be like (clean, polluted, overgrown, free-flowing) and how this shapes human action; the interaction of natural, social, political, and technological aspects within the hydrosocial cycle; living by and within water, and so on.

These themes are also gradually emerging in Latvia, both in research (for example, the water cultures project led by Anita Zariņa at the University of Latvia), in publications (such as the edited volume Dzīve līdzās ostai compiled by Dace Bula), and in student work.”

Full article in latvian is available here