Perspectives

Boggs’ focus on human niche construction and the Anthropocene places the spotlight on our actions and the values they reflect, as well as how we should deal with environmental problems.

This essay examines what the concept of the Anthropocene means for environmental law and policy. Humans can be viewed as both insider and outsider—as an integral part of nature, which we have a duty to protect, and as lord and master of the natural world, taking what we can for our own survival. Eagle explores how the choice of an insider or outsider view can influence political discussions regarding environmental regulation.

LeCain provides a detailed analysis of Chakrabarty’s “Four Theses” and its implications for humanism. This thinking diverges from that of Western Enlightenment by challenging the humanistic belief that we are separate from, even above, the material world. In fact, human culture is inextricably linked to the natural material world; we are both a force and product of it.

Urban mining—reclaiming valuable metals from discarded electronic devices—has become an important economic activity in the informal sector in places such as Agbogbloshie, a slum in Accra, Ghana. This article examines the material flows linking Ghana with the rest of the world, the politics of waste recycling, and the hazards faced by those processing e-waste.

Energy-from-waste plants in places like Britain were designed help reduce waste and carbon emissions, but they have had unintended side-effects.

For the residents of Ozersk, a small town that was the home to Russia’s first plutonium plant, the health effects of radioactivity have been too-little acknowledged by governments that prefer to focus instead on measuring “exposures” and isotope measurements in the surrounding environment.

Artwork and film projects have the potential to expose trash in a variety of forms and help us visualize, acknowledge, and critique larger systems in which plastic waste circulates and operates.

Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island, New York, was the subject of a struggle over where to dispose of the waste of a city strapped for space. While the landfill was closed in 2001, the events of 9/11 and the need to clear the large amounts of rubble and human remains from the site of the Twin Towers attack turned Fresh Kills into hallowed ground, which posed new questions about the future of the site.

Kleinstuck Marsh in Michigan is not the pristine, untouched landscape it might at first seem. Once a peat bog, the property was drained for a botanical garden and later sold as an unwanted piece of property and embedded with sewage pipes for a neighboring housing development, before becoming a nature preserve.