Category Archives: Environment

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 aware of the leaching chemicals and associated health risks, they organized to investigate the problems and demand government action.

We need to think about redefining citizenship in the Anthropocene

The concept of citizenship originally described inhabitants of (probably walled) towns. Some insistence on specificity of place certainly remains, although the concept today generally refers to nations rather than cities. But what are concerned citizens to do in the face of problems such as climate change, which cannot easily be contained by walls or borders, and to which we all contribute?

Difference in the Anthropocene: Indigenous Environmentalism in the Face of Settler Colonialism

Both Todd and Whyte argue that achieving climate justice for and by Indigenous people requires addressing the ways in which global environmental change is intimately connected with— and in fact is predicated upon— practices of settler colonialism.

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 that it had pushed Earth into a new epoch. They called it the Anthropocene and argued the current Holocene epoch was over.

The case for a people’s smart sanctions campaign against Trump’s America

The forces arrayed against Donald Trump’s presidency in the US could soon encompass most of the world once Trump’s climate change threats meet resistance.

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.

Bibliography for Critical Ecology

Since ecological metaphors, systems, and thinking are implicit to much of discard studies, we’re happy to share this crowdsourced bibliography on critical perspectives of ecology.

Victory at Standing Rock reflects a failure of US energy and climate policy

Stopping the pipeline in one spot, after all, won’t stop oil altogether. Climate change, however, is a threat most of all to Indigenous peoples around the world.

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 of them are bureaucrats and techies.

Fracking, mining, murder: the killer agenda driving migration in Mexico and Central America

Why negotiate with poor Indigenous communities sitting atop valuable oil, water, wood and ore if they can be pushed off their land with hidden criminal, political and misogynistic forces?