Putting 20,000 black plastic balls in water after people have been warned against throwing plastic into waterways has sparked a number of questions. Our plastic expert talks about what happens when water meets plastic:
“”During the first hour spent in houses with suspected indoor air-quality issues, I would slowly develop an ache in the back of my eyes, which would with time spread throughout my skull. I repeatedly found myself struggling to resist a physical desire to expedite interviews as my mind felt increasingly woolly, my focus slipped, and my lines of inquiry lost their direction.”
How do you communicate permanent pollution and toxicity to future generations? We held workshops with community members in Yellowknife and Dettah to make models about they would communicate the dangers of buried arsenic at the local Giant Mine into the future.
Representations are the basis of human knowledge both in terms of how knowledge is made as well as how it is reproduced and circulated. They are the way reality is interpreted and conveyed for others. Our discussions about how to best convey what we’ve been researching have focused on being as clear, charismatic, and accurate as possible. We don’t want to give up accuracy to be more sensational. But we don’t want to make accurate statements that fall flat. Our goal is to do and describe science in a way that launches action that mitigates plastic pollution. How you describe a problem determines what kind of solutions make sense or not.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The Ocean Cleanup array, designed to clean plastics from the ocean like a baleen whale, is one of these good intentions: experts in marine plastics, including myself, say it’s a bad idea.Technological fixes like the Array do harm to the larger project of ending plastic pollution, which is a complex social, environmental, and economic problem. It is also going to damage and kill marine life.
Our project aims to unveil the potential for the Commons within the outdoor urban infrastructure of Churchill Square in St. John’s, Newfoundland, by locating heat leaks from wasted heat. We wanted to find out which areas in the Square provided a bit of warmth during the long, cold winter to imagine the possibility of public congregation or reclaimed community space.
From tiny flakes of paint to defunct satellites, there is increasing attention to the space debris that orbits the Earth and exists on other planets. This bibliography provides a range of articles, interviews, and reports on the increasingly dire case of orbital debris.
The distribution of environmental damage in time as well as space is a key aspect of this problem, one not always recognized in the oft-invoked notion of pollution as “matter out of place.”
Slow violence and chronic disasters create a representational challenge. How do you visualize a non-event so that it imparts the severity of the problem without turning it into an event?
If a key challenge of slow violence is how to adequately represent it so that it may be investigated, opposed, and redressed why represent its power as more formidable than it already is? There is poetry in the law, but legal personhood for corporations is not magic. It’s infrastructure.
Discard Studies 