Necrovitality and Porous Exclusions: On Dying amidst Chemical Vitalities
Note: This post contains images of skin wounds. If you are dermatophobic, read/view at your own discretion. You may instead listen to the post. An entry into the…
Tag: Pollution
Does corporate sustainability count for anything?
Matthew Archer’s Unsustainable critiques the frameworks used to measure corporate sustainability and exposes how market-driven reporting shirks environmental responsibility. This convincing and timely…
Odors, Leakage and Containment: The Story of a Southern California Landfill
In Val Verde, California, an unincorporated community just a few miles north of popular amusement destination, Six Flags Magic Mountain, it is possible to glimpse the top of…
Hawa-laat: Polluted Air in Delhi, India
In 2015, I was back in India’s capital city, Delhi after two years of fieldwork in villages in rural parts of the country. On my return, the city…
Don’t trust science? Citizen science offers the chance to do it yourself
“People around the world have high levels of trust in scientists, but are concerned about governments interfering in research” states a news article in the journal Nature. Another…
Exploring PFAS contamination’s impact on groundwater and environmental governance
By Colleen Linn, Wayne State University. Groundwater is difficult to observe (Ballestero 2019, Walsh 2018), and is an elusive substance despite being the most relied upon drinking water…
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…
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…