Interplanetary Environmentalism (Part 1)
On Earth we sometimes identify and protect places we recognize as holding special cultural, scientific, religious, political, historical, or heritage value. By doing so, we hope to preserve…
Tag: environment
Why Dwarfism?
In the immortal words of Lennon and McCartney, “I read the news today, oh boy.” By now, you have probably read the news, too, about the discovery of…
Thom van Dooren’s Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the End of Extinction by Eva Giraud
Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the End of Extinction by Thom van Dooren Columbia University Press, 2014. 208 pages. Flight Ways begins with a question: at what moment should…
Climate Wars
Fiji’s human history is directly linked to the ebbs and flows of climate change—particularly of sea-level rise. Throughout the Pacific Islands, fluctuating environmental conditions resulting from…
Excavating the Chesapeake: Exploring the Intersecting Geological, Political, and Technical Layers that Constitute a Watershed
By Jeremy Trombley, University of Maryland, College Park § My research looks at the entities and interactions that constitute the Chesapeake Bay watershed – specifically the role that computational mo…
Lao Camp Food (Part 2)
This is the second installment of a food journal I kept during several days in February camping with a bomb clearance team in Laos. If you missed my…
India’s Uber Dilemma: Entrepreneurship or Exploitation?
Uber is part of a “gig economy” trend in India and elsewhere—an economy partially powered by self-employed workers on short-term jobs. While it offers flexible schedules for its…
Anthropocene Adjustments: Discarding the Technosphere
The technosphere refers to a new layer on the planet made up of “the interlinked set of communication, transportation, bureaucratic and other systems that act to metabolize fossil…
A Bibliography for Teaching Flint
This bibliography is designed for professors who want to “teach Flint” in their classrooms. The Flint, Michigan water crisis is an extreme but quintessential case study that shows…
Hurricane Katrina’s Forgotten Survivors
Following Katrina, progress rebuilding New Orleans has been uneven. In the Lower 9th Ward, house foundations are still a common sight. Max Becherer/Associated Press When Hurricane Katrina…
Shared Sanitation: Bathroom Access and Facilities Around the World
Questions of bathroom access tend to have the greatest impact on the poor and the marginalized. — Read more on ScientificAmerican.com
Shared Sanitation: Bathroom Access and Facilities Around the World
Questions of bathroom access tend to have the greatest impact on the poor and the marginalized. — Read more on ScientificAmerican.com
Domesticating Water
Water is the most immediate requisite element for human survival. For most of humanity’s history (written and unwritten), where people could live was constrained by the need to…
Shattered Homes and Hard Choices in Post-Quake Nepal
The days following Nepal’s devastating, 7.8 magnitude earthquake on April 25, 2015, passed for me in a blur of sleeplessness and checking Facebook. I ached to be there.…
Thompson on Sills, ‘Toxic War: The Story of Agent Orange’
The use of the defoliant Agent Orange by the United States is one of the most controversial actions of the Vietnam War. InToxic War: The Story of Agent…
The Myth of the Virgin Rainforest
The little village of Pa Lungan sits in a grassy clearing, high in the hills of Malaysian Borneo, in a region called the Kelabit Highlands. The people here—a…
Environmental historians get wasted: ASEH conference report
What’s my take on this torrent of waste at ASEH? I think it really signals a maturation of a second generation of waste scholarship in environmental history that…
Flora of Qatar
For anyone interested in photographs of the flora of Qatar, there is a fine website produced by Dr. Alexey Sergeev. You can even search by species. Overall the…
CFP: Transecology: Transgender Perspectives on the Environment
Chapter proposals are invited for the edited book Transecology: Transgender Perspectives on the Environment, due by May 15, 2016. This volume will explore the intersection between transgender studies…
Tactics of Power and Empowerment in Knowledge-Making Infrastructures
By Kirk Jalbert, Manager of Community Based Research & Engagement, FracTracker Alliance and Visiting Research Professor, Center for Science, Technology and Society, Drexel University § Energy extr…
CFP: Living and Dying with “Waste Infrastructure”: Affect and Practicalities (AAA)
This panel takes seriously the way of living or dying near the waste infrastructure, showing explicitly ethnographic inquiries of despair, anxiety, hope, and sense of purity, safety, and…
CFP: Ambient Matter: Sensorial Engagements with a Toxic World (AAA)
CALL FOR PAPERS American Anthropological Association Meetings Minneapolis, MN. November 16-20, 2016 Panel title: Ambient Matter: Sensorial Engagements with a Toxic World Panel abstract: An anthropolog…
Refusal as Research Method in Discard Studies
Ethnographic refusal is a practice by which researchers and research participants together decide not to make particular information available for use within the academy. Its purpose is not…
Exploring Boundaries: From Access to Female Sexworkers to the Question of Research
When designing a research project, a researcher’s initial plans are often interrupted by what data we actually can access. Whether negotiating political structures, cultural taboos, necessary permissi…