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.
As palm oil travels from oil, to seed, to market, this controversial substance becomes associated with moral notions of ‘purity’. We take a multi-temporal and multi-scalar approach to understanding this process: examining current and historical literatures on economic botany and lipid chemistry, we unfold the tactics by which these palms and their oils are purified, and identify how these are reproduced in current marketing trends. Purity, this reveals, is a dream. Though this dream is unattainable, it has shaped plants and their oils, human bodies, and ecosystems, all the while masking the troubling consequences of its doing so.
Contemporary nativist logics, evident in the Right’s responses to coronavirus, stand poised to converge with a budding conservative climate politics that conveniently pitches the militarization of borders as a core piece of “our” contribution to combating a warming and unsteady world. Climate change looms as a powerful frame in the nativist politics of the future, and anti-immigrant sentiment is likely to flourish in the conservative environmentalism to come.
Using Paraguay as a site of genealogical engagement, this paper by Kregg Hetherington explores agribiopolitical relations through three phases of the Green Revolution, culminating in the current age of monocrops.