Colonizing Mars or Colonizing the Earth? A Reflection on Landscape and SpaceX in Texas
By Robert Kopack, University of South Carolina § I was startled awake by a faint voice announcing something across the humid, coastal air. Maybe it was a shift…
Tag: Pollution
Reading Max Liboiron’s Pollution is Colonialism in a Chemistry Lab
Pollution is Colonialism book cover Pollution is Colonialism (Liboiron 2021) uses plastics to trace pollution in fish stomachs in Newfoundland while showing how this pollution is embedded in…
You Are What You Grow: Crops, Cultivation, and Caste in India
The allure of the onion Fieldwork can produce odd obsessions. As an anthropologist studying agrarian risk economies, mine was onions. In the central Indian region of Malwa where…
Viral Entanglements in Malaysian Porcine Worlds
This browser does not support HTML5 audio Listen to an audio recording of this piece read by Kymberley Chu Content warning: This blog post contains photo…
Plastic Pollution Goes Far Beyond Litter by Gauri Pathak
Plastics in the oceans. Beaches littered with plastics. Images of whales and cows with plastics in their bellies. Calls for citizens not to litter, to throw away trash…
Anomalous Waste: Reckoning with Radioactivity in a Metal Scrap Market
Editorial Note: This post is part of our series highlighting the work of the Anthropology and Environment Society’s 2019 Roy A. Rappaport Prize Finalists. We asked them to outline the…
Clean in Times of Covid-19: on Hygiene and Pollution by Mandy de Wilde
As the coronavirus pandemic spreads, air pollution and greenhouse emissions decrease, or so news reports say. The satellite images of China in lockdown provided a first striking example. In…
Unsustainable City
In New York, the sustainable city is being built on its own undoing. In 2014, residents of Staten Island’s Elm Park neighborhood found their cars covered in dust.…
Gasping for Air in the Time of COVID-19
The impact of the virus is having suffocating effects in more ways than one. Sorbetto/Getty Images Panic about COVID-19, a novel flu-like disease that emerged in Wuhan, China,…
Book Forum: Daniel Renfrew’s Life Without Lead: Contamination, Crisis, and Hope in Uruguay by Andrés Romero
Introduction Daniel Renfrew’s Life Without Lead: Contamination, Crisis, and Hope in Uruguay (2018) is a masterful undertaking on the anthropology of disaster and its everydayness. An ethnograp…
Pollution Does Not “Go Away”: Mylar Balloons and Air Quality in California’s Pristine Wastelands
By Julia Sizek, University of California at Berkeley § Joshua Tree National Park regularly ranks as the National Park with the second-worst air quality, but its pollution is…
Pollution Made by Nature: The Circulation of Nitrate Knowledge in Iowa Agriculture and Conservation
Editorial Note: This post is part of our series highlighting the work of the Anthropology and Environment Society’s 2018 Roy A. Rappaport Prize Finalists. We asked them to…
Commentary: Toxic Bodies, Part II
By Kristina Lyons, University of California, Santa Cruz § The president of the communal action committee whom I call Doña Marta ushered me to a more secluded corner behind…
Remediation: The Cultural Politics of Oil and Brine Spills in the Bakken
Around Tioga, a small town in northwestern North Dakota, huge tractors, seeders, and sprayers lumber along the shoulders of the highways in spring. In midsummer, sunflowers turn yellow;…
Weeds, Herbicides, and Bodies: Emerging Entanglements in Toxic Agricultural Landscapes
By Tony VanWinkle, Sterling College § Dedicated to the memory of Jackie Dill. Pigweed. Photo by author. Shortly after the unexpected death of friend and mentor Jackie Dill, I…
Save the Oceans!
Numerous studies indicate if human waste management and consumer patterns continue as they are now, then in 2050 the plastic in the world’s oceans will weigh more than…
Commentary: Toxic Bodies, Part I
By Mónica Salas Landa, Lafayette College § Oil infrastructure, Poza Rica, Veracruz, Mexico. Image by author. ‘‘How do you feel living right across from the oil and gas complex?’’ I…
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…
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…
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…
Benzene, PCBs, and industrial chemistry: A narrative bibliography
How the Benzene Tree Polluted the World in The Atlantic by Rebecca Altman, is a narrative exploration of the rise of organic chemistry, and the industrialization of the branch of chemistry…
Virtual Waste: Flowing from a data center near you
Thinking with virtual data demonstrates that reduction of material waste alone does not mean a reduction of an overall environmental footprint on this planet.
Review of Richard S. Newman’s “Love Canal: A Toxic History from Colonial Times to the Present”
Newman’s activists press for environmental change imbedded with critiques of capitalism and industrialization, racial injustice, and its global implications. This view distorts the complexity of histo…
Pollution is Colonialism
Colonialism in Canada is an ongoing structure whereby settler society and government assert sovereignty over lands already occupied by Indigenous peoples.