The Politics of Nature in the Anthropocene
McAfee examines the changing roles of scientists and politicians in the decision-making processes that affect the environment.
McAfee examines the changing roles of scientists and politicians in the decision-making processes that affect the environment.
In this article for a special section on “Inheriting the Ecological Legacies of Settler Colonialism,” Lesley Instone and Affrica Taylor engage with the figure of the Anthropocene as the impetus for rethinking the messy environmental legacies of Australian settler colonialism.
In this special issue on Multispecies Studies, Hugo Reinert places multispecies studies in conversation with the geological turn by examining the place of a particular sacrifice stone in the ambit of a coastal mining development in northern Norway.
This collection of essays maps the heterogeneous and asymmetrical ecologies within which we are enmeshed, a material world that makes the human possible but also offers difficulties and resistance.
Triangulating narratives from a prospective mining site in northern Norway, Hugo Reinert works to identify (and render graspable) a particular effect of retroactive shock—tracing its resonance through experiences of chemical exposure, colonial racism, cultural erasure, and destruction of the built environment.
In this article, Sasha Litvintseva examines the history and materiality of asbestos to theorize toxic embodiment through the mutuality of the haptic sense and the breaching of boundaries of inside and outside. She develops this through an analysis of her own film project Asbestos (2016), shot at the mining town of Asbestos, Quebec.
In this selection of poems, Adam Dickinson focuses on the “outside” that is the “inside,” thereby drawing attention to the coextensive and intra-active nature of the body with its environment and the consequent implications for linking the human to the nonhuman and the personal to the global in environmental ethics.
Michael Marder interprets the “toxic flood” we are living or dying through as a global dump. On his reading, multiple levels of existence—from the psychic to the physiological, from the environmental-elemental to the planetary—are being converted into a dump, a massive and still growing hodgepodge of industrial and consumer by-products and emissions; shards of metaphysical ideas and theological dreams; radioactive materials; light, sound, and other modes of sensory pollution; pesticides and herbicides; and so forth.
In the afterword of a special section on toxic embodiment, Stacy Alaimo distills the collection’s argument for attending to the ways environments, human bodies, and nonhuman bodies are transformed by anthropogenic substances.