Fish by Jennifer Lee Johnson
If you’ve seen Hubert Sauper’s (2004) documentary film Darwin’s Nightmare you may remember the stark contrast he draws between the sterile disassembly line of a factory producing Nile…
Tag: environment
Trump’s cuts to national monuments are an assault on our humanity – fight them
Reducing Utah’s national monuments is not simply about economics, archeology, ecology or grazing. The degradation of our public lands is a degradation of our humanity Monday, 4 December,…
Trump’s cuts to national monuments are an assault on our humanity – fight them
Reducing Utah’s national monuments is not simply about economics, archeology, ecology or grazing. The degradation of our public lands is a degradation of our humanity Monday, 4 December,…
Lake by Muchaparara Musemwa
Introduction Urban man-made bodies of water such as lakes can be sources of aesthetic beauty and leisure and can boost a city’s economy and tourism industry. They satisfy…
Art by Mehita Iqani
Cape Mongo is a multimedia installation that focuses on consumer waste as medium and subject. It is a complex artwork, comprising sculpture using found materials (mostly what viewers…
Sea Level Rise Threatens Archaeological Sites
Graves that are more than 400 years old in Jamestown, Virginia, lie near the first Protestant church in what later became the United States. Jamestown is just one…
Chemical Showers: How Daily Routines Structure Our Exposures to Toxicants
By Rachael Wakefield-Rann, University of Technology Sydney § Source: http://cdn.mamamia.com.au/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/04144722/supermarket-skin-care-buys1.png The choreography of daily life dic…
Poop by Joshua Grace
For colonial officials in British East Africa, African excrement endangered public health because Africans were reckless defecators. The world was their toilet, and they simply went where they…
These chemicals are bad for babies and whales: Why haven’t they been banned in Canada?
Canadian regulators are all over the map with respect to flame retardants. On PBDEs, Canada infamously refused to take meaningful regulatory action. The government found most PBDEs to…
Island by Pamila Gupta
Island. They are meditative, graspable and productive to think with. On the one hand, they are often conceptualized as the beginning of the world, sites of existential and…
Dump by Anne Berg
South Africa, 1994. Apartheid before, democracy after. Nonetheless, obstinate continuities stretch across this important rupture. Bisasar Road Landfill, the largest registered landfill on the A…
Moving the Circular Economy Beyond Alchemy
This review of a special issue of the Journal of Industrial Ecology titled, “Exploring the Circular Economy” is a virtual tour of circular economy definitions and current directions.…
The climate has changed before. But this is different – look at the archeological record
A major new report states unequivocally that humans are changing the planet. Archaeology puts those changes into context – and explains why action is crucial The United States…
The climate has changed before. But this is different – look at the archeological record
A major new report states unequivocally that humans are changing the planet. Archaeology puts those changes into context – and explains why action is crucial The United States…
Port by Jatin Dua
Indian Ocean port cities are worlds of coral and glass. Consider Lamu or Zanzibar on the East African coast with their labyrinthine old towns where ornate buildings made…
How Archaeologists Uncover History With Trees
In the fall of 1282, a young carpenter went to his favorite stand of juniper trees in southwestern Colorado. That stand contained a large number of tall trees…
Urban noise pollution is worst in poor and minority neighborhoods and segregated cities
Neighborhoods with median annual incomes below US$25,000 were nearly 2 decibels louder than neighborhoods with incomes above $100,000 per year. And nationwide, communities with 75 percent black reside…
Urban by Claudia Gastrow
In July 2015 a Facebook campaign entitled selfie lixo (garbage selfie) was launched in Angola. It asked people to pose in front of piles of uncollected garbage in…
Tracing Chemical Intimacies
By Sophia Jaworski (University of Toronto) A middle-aged woman in the Greater Toronto Area wears a charcoal mask in her bedroom to prevent asthma spurred by breathing in…
Detritus by Sharad Chari
I employed the category ‘detritus’ in the early 2000s to diagnose the different kinds of residues of racial capitalism with which people struggled in the shadows of South…
Waste by Jennifer Wenzel
Waste is a tricky word. In our meditations in Somatosphere, waste hews toward its concrete sense as discard: material byproducts of some transformative process, metabolic or mechanical; things…
Can We “See” Climate Change?
While standing on the Senate floor in Washington, D.C., in February 2015, Republican Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma expressed his deep skepticism about climate change. “We keep hearing…
Toxicity by Danny Hoffman
1. Toxicity names forces for which there is no remediation. Ibrahim is a tour guide in the Senegalese capital, Dakar. His carefully crafted tour takes you around the…