Category Archives: World

When Deep Time Becomes Shallow: Knowing Nuclear Waste Risk Ethnographically

When reflecting on these intertwined day-to-day, multi-decade, centurial, and multi-millennial horizons of nuclear waste risk all at the same time, a different set of sensibilities emerges. Namely, it becomes evident how relatively short-term events like unanticipated deaths, retirements of key experts, obsolescence of information storage technologies, and surprise career-changes can potentially shake nuclear waste management projects’ stabilities.

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.

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.

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?

Trump may reverse US climate policy but will have trouble dismantling EPA

History suggests that it may be harder to make radical cuts at EPA than Trump and his advisors think. While many politicians have called for eliminating entire cabinet agencies, none has succeeded.

Why it’s easier for India to get to Mars than to tackle its toilet challenge

In 2013, India became the fourth country in the world (after Russia, the United States and the European Union) and the only emerging nation to launch a Mars probe into space. But it remains part of the group of 45 developing countries with less than 50% sanitation coverage, with many citizens practising open defecation, either due to lack of access to a toilet or because of personal preference.

On Solidarity and Molecules (#MakeMuskratRight)

Deferring to molecules rather than social movements when it comes to contamination is a case of power relations.

Location, location, location: why South Australia could take the world’s nuclear waste

South Australia’s Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission has recommended the state investigate an international storage site for intermediate and high-level (spent fuel) nuclear waste.

Reconciliation’s Waste: heritage and waste in post-apartheid South Africa

Portable toilets and urine on colonial era statues are reconciliations ruins, the things leftover that heritage helps to frame but yet cannot fully explain. As matter that remains unresolved, I think it tells us about the unfinished work of reconciliation in South Africa.

Thompson on Sills, ‘Toxic War: The Story of Agent Orange’

The use of the defoliant Agent Orange by the United States is one of the most controversial actions of the Vietnam War. InToxic War: The Story of Agent Orange, Peter Sills provides much-needed clarity to the history of Agent Orange with his use of data made available by legal proceedings.