A curation of articles, essays, book reviews and interviews on critical geographical concerns.
Investigates the way that nature is enrolled in, and a site of, social and cultural politics, attending specifically to discourses, governance and practice.
In his provocative book "Refounding Environmental Ethics: Pragmatism, Principle, and Practice", Ben Minteer challenges this dominant perspective in the field of environmental ethics with its emphasis on nonanthropocentrism and the intrinsic value of nature. He argues that the near-exclusive focus on these issues has left the field isolated and largely irrelevant at a time when environmental problems are crying for ethical guidance.
"Flammable" tells the story of Villa Inflamable (translated and referred to in the text as ‘Flammable’), a shantytown on the edge of Buenos Aires, hemmed in by a petrochemical complex and the festering waters of the Río de la Plata, and which was named for a ship explosion just offshore. It is, as Auyero and Swistun tell it, a story of urban relegation and environmental suffering, of people whose lives are shaped in profound and permanent ways by the toxic environment in which they live, and by the confusion, longing, and resignation produced by indifferent state bureaucracy, duplicitous corporations, and prying journalists (and, it must be said, researchers).
Drawing on a heatwave case study in Western Sydney, Australia, the paper explores how practices of thermal comfort for particular, often privileged, bodies may be understood as sensory enablers of climate change denial.
This paper explores the policy concept and community enactments of ‘shared responsibility’ for disaster resilience in the context of wildfires in Victoria, Australia.
In this article I examine the enlistment of Arctic ice to tell grand, universal stories about humanity’s origins and endings. To upend temperate-normative ideals of landscape and livelihood, I analyze a poem titled “Exceeding Beringia” by Joan Naviyuk Kane (Inupiaq) wherein Inupiaq relations to more-than-human kin articulate transit and migration as a mutual, obligatory responsibility.
Hannah Arendt developed a twofold account of ‘being earthbound’ directly relevant to Anthropocene debates regarding the political. For Arendt, both senses of ‘being earthbound’ arose as humans began to act into nature, not merely upon it.
By attending to chemicals through the mundane work of removal, Angeliki Balayannis' paper opens up different lines of inquiry for studies of waste, and enriches understandings of materiality by considering how visual representations make a difference.