Parrotfish: The Charisma of Conservation in the Caribbean
During the week of Easter, the beaches of the Dominican Republic were converted into billboards for the campaign to stop the consumption of parrotfish. Pictures taken from drones…
Tag: environment
How Fracking’s Appetite for Sand Is Devouring Rural Communities
[no-caption] “Do you want to see the mine?” asks Harlan*. “Of course,” I reply. He fetches his boots. We head outside with his wife Edith and follow a…
How a Eurasian Steppe Empire Coped With Decades of Drought
[no-caption] Tuul & Bruno Morandi /Getty Images The bitterly cold, dry air of the Central Asian steppe is a boon to researchers who study the region. The frigid…
Western Science Is Finally Catching Up to Traditional Ecological Knowledge
Indigenous groups in northern Australia have observed—and even indicated in ceremony and story—kites and falcons, or “firehawks,” deliberately transporting lit sticks in order to spread fire. …
How Chinese Immigrants Built—and Lost—a Shellfish Industry
Abalone, which were once abundant in the coastal waters of California, are now primarily cultivated on farms. Universal Images Group/Getty Images At a sleepy outpost in the Sierra…
Where a River of Life Became a Border of Control
[no-caption] Wenting Li/SAPIENS The floor of the El Paso International Airport’s baggage claim area is a marble mosaic design; blue stones represent the Rio Grande (or Río Bravo,…
New book on Water Justice
This looks like quite a nice collection from Cambridge University Press. Water Justice Edited by Rutgerd Boelens, Tom Perreault, and Jeroen Vos Book description Water justice is becoming…
Susanna Trnka’s One Blue Child: Asthma, Responsibility, and the Politics of Global Health by Paul Mason
One Blue Child: Asthma, Responsibility, and the Politics of Global Health By Susanna Trnka Stanford University Press, 2017, 262 pages. Bringing children to the field can change…
Beach by Meg Samuelson
Beaches are good places to think with about waste and ruination. They were once generically places of waste (in the etymological sense of “unoccupied, uncultivated”) while recognized as…
What Really Happened on Easter Island?
The famous statues of Easter Island have long been a source of awe and wonder. John Elk III/Alamy Photos This article was originally published at The Conversation and has been…
Body by Joshua O. Reno
It is increasingly impossible to think of the problem of waste, or discarded and denigrated materials, separately from the problem of race, or discarded and denigrated people. There…
Yellow Water: Rupture and Return One Year after the Gold King Mine Spill
Figure 1. A view of Animas Creek taken one year after the August 2015 Gold King Mine spill that discharged three million gallons of acid mine water toward…
Residue by Gabrielle Hecht
Waste and toxicity are foundational categories of knowledge for the Anthropocene. Consider how natural scientists approach the topic. Empirically, the “great acceleration” they’ve identified correspon…
Drift by Charne Lavery
The ocean has long been considered the ideal location for the disposal of waste—including, among many other things, treated and untreated sewage poured easily into the sea, the…
Natural Disasters Are Social Disasters
When Hurricane Harvey dumped more than 4 feet of rain over parts of Houston in August, the National Weather Service needed two new colors for their rainfall maps:…
In Search of the Toxic Berry Patch
By Janelle Baker, McGill University § In Memory of the late “Cibomb” Clement Auger Cibomb. Photo by Janelle Baker. Rattling down a dusty oil field road in his little…
Minerals by Robyn d’Avignon
Mining is a toxic business and gold mining is particularly noxious. Mercury and cyanide pollute river-ways and sentient bodies. The large-scale evacuation of earth often acidifies water tables,…
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…
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…