The nineteenth-century critique of the emerging “metabolic rift” between city sewers and country farms lamented that with the rise of the sanitary metropolis and the emergence of input-intensive agriculture in Europe and North America, products that had formerly connected urban and rural nutrient cycles were reclassified as waste.
Over the past few decades, we have met with much success in curbing some of Americans’ exposure to lead. Yet they have struggled to contain this continuing danger precisely because it is literally built into our water systems.
A pair of new publications focus on the “chicken or egg” question in environmental justice: Are present-day disparities around hazardous sites the result of a pattern of placing hazardous waste sites, polluting industrial facilities, and other locally unwanted land uses (LULUs) disproportionately where poor people and people of color live? Or are they the result of demographic changes that occur after the facilities have been sited?
Originally posted on speculative fish-ctions (Dr. Zoe Todd):
by Zoe Todd, PhD Candidate, Social Anthropology, University of Aberdeen Personal paradigm shifts have a way of sneaking up on you. It started, innocently enough, with a trip to Edinburgh to see the great Latour discuss his latest work in February 2013. I was giddy with excitement:…
There is little evidence that transnational shipments of “e-waste” derive from attempts by exporters to elude strict environmental regulations and indicate rather that global flows are mainly driven by the quest for working or repairable secondhand devices, spare parts and recyclable materials.
As part of the European Week for Waste Reduction, Hubbub and the North London Waste Authority (NLWA) are hosting a range of £5 cooking session across seven North London boroughs to encourage people to turn their food waste into gifts.
A study of men from the Faroe Islands finds that high DDT and PCB exposure during adolescence and adulthood is associated with abnormal chromosomes in sperm. By Brian Bienkowski, EHN.
This session picks up on work that posits an understanding of waste as emergent, or as co-emerging alongside certain configurations of governance.
Ecological science, invited as queer tactic, can transfigure political ecology’s relations to and interchanges within the Anthropocene. Political ecology shares with queer theory an interest in the boundaries around ‘nature’; both sets of discourses challenge the naturalness of such categories as heterosexuality, hierarchy, and wilderness.
Landfills partake of multiple temporal scales, making them difficult to regulate and run. Taking into account multiple timescapes, or polychronicity, reveals the constitutive role of non-human beings and forces in waste management generally. As a result, political challenges to landfills are limited if they fail to recognize landfill landscapes as a polychronic and multi-species affair.
Discard Studies 