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…
Tag: Pollution
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.
The forgotten story of how a toxic spill and a book launched Britain’s environmental movement
When in 1963 some farm animals in the parish of Smarden in Kent became sick and died, suspicions fell on a nearby pesticide factory run by a division…
How we discovered pollution-poisoned crustaceans in the Mariana Trench
A trench amphipod, Hirondellea gigas, from the deepest place on Earth: Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench (10,890m). Alan Jamieson, Newcastle University, Author provided Alan Jamieson, Newcastle Un…
Your city could be exporting deadly air pollution – here’s why
Goods and services produced in one region for use by another region are responsible for 22% (762,400) of air pollution-related deaths worldwide.
Cleaning up toxic sites shouldn’t clear out the neighbors
Notions of “sustainability” and “urban greening” ought to include values of justice and equity. Otherwise, important projects like the Blue Greenway will build sustainable waterfronts for the urban…
Call for Posts: Toxic Bodies
“A pigeon trap”. By Provincial Archives of Alberta. (No restrictions, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44059615) Epigenetics, developmental biology, and feminist science and…
Pristine paradise to rubbish dump: the same Pacific island, 23 years apart
Remember, this is not waste that was dumped directly by human hands. It was washed here on ocean currents, meaning that this is not just about one beach…
Bibliography on critical approaches to toxics and toxicity
Toxicity, toxins, and toxicants are areas of critical concern because controversies over what they mean, how they act, how they come into being and where, and what counts as…
Human Contamination: The Infectious Border Crossings of Jeff VanderMeer’s Area X by Sophia Booth Magnone
“What if an infection was a message, a brightness a kind of symphony? As a defense? An odd form of communication? If so, the message had not been…
Community Responses to Toxic Hazards: A Reading List
A reading list of the David and Goliath story of communities versus industries, governments, and polluting infrastructures.
On (not) seeing artificial light at night: Light pollution or lighting poverty?
By Dr. Sara B. Pritchard Department of Science & Technology Studies, Cornell University So it began. This was the image that sparked my interest in light pollution and light-pollution…
Recycling Reconsidered: A must-read text for discard studies
If I could only recommend one text in discard studies, it would be Recycling Reconsidered by Samantha MacBride (2011, MIT Press).
Repair-scapes
How might thinking through repair in terms of space change how we think about – and practice – repair? In what follows, we describe four cases from our…
Review of ‘Love Canal: A Toxic History from Colonial Times to the Present’
Richard S. Newman’s recent book offers a new history of Love Canal, the neighborhood near Niagara Falls that became notoriously contaminated by buried chemical waste. As residents became…
Introducing the terrifying mathematics of the Anthropocene
In 2000, Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer proposed that human impact on the atmosphere, the oceans, the land and ice sheets had reached such a scale…
Research challenges the view that environmental regulators are anti-business
Interactions between regulators and the private sector at the federal and state levels typically are collegial, and that both sides work to build and maintain cooperative partnerships.
CFP: Theorizing Harm
Whether focused on toxicity, disease, disaster, violence, or malfunction, STS scholars have long studied harm. Given the great diversity of approaches and cases, this panel seeks to take…
Take a deep breath – here’s what 2016 revealed about the deadly dangers of air pollution
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has confirmed that 92% of the world’s urban population now live in cities where the air is toxic.
Bureaucrats and techies leading the pollution resistance against Trump
Some of Trumps efforts are literally to support and intensify environmental pollution, and some are efforts to make certain people disposable. But people are fighting back. A lot…