In this gallery you will find presentations, using a standard format, of situations of societal debate, controversy and conflict around questions of environmental and development action. We call these situations "Hot Spots".
The HotSpots are geo-referenced, through localising each profile at a point on a scalable map. The HotSpots are classified in a variety of different ways, using the filters found on the left-hand side of the catalogue presentation. These filters provide classifications in terms of/ .... / ....
Specific collections of HotSpots, corresponding to specific themes or user communities, can be visualised on the interactive map.
One of these collections (a rather large one) gives, through the corresponding profiles, links through to points on the Environmental Justice 'Atlas' created during 2010-2014by the EJOLT Project and maintened since that time by an international volunteer community. Lien vers EJATLAS.
Some of the HotSpots are the focus of further developments and analyses within ePLANETe. Notably, the KerBabel deliberation support tools are used to provide an in-depth characterisation of the patterns of controversy for certain HotSpots, via multi-criteria multi-actor evaluation (found in the kerDST galleries). These in-depth descriptions may then be exploited for pedagogic presentations (found in the "Forest of Brocéliande" gallery of learning and teaching resources). And so on.
This gallery is reletively recently integrated into ePLANETe and some of its features are still experimental. Although the cross-link functionality to objects in other galleries is fully operational, there are many relevant cross-linkages yet to be implemented at this stage.
We hope that the Gallery of HotSpots can help to provide visibility to the spectrum of environmental (and economic) justice challenges that "divide" us within our societies, and help also to promote understanding of the texture of these conflicts as situations where "might as right" needs often to yield to principled compromise. The resolution of conflicts about access to environmental wealth and about the distribution (across sections of society and through time) often may seem impossible. This is nonetheless one of the core challenges in the contemporary search for "sustainability" -- in moral and ethical, as well as environmental and economic terms.