Hatmaker, Susie, "On Mattering: A Coal Ash Flood and the Limits of Environmental Knowledge"
Susie Hatmaker investigates the largest flood of coal ash in United States history in 2008 as an event at once monumental and insignificant.
Susie Hatmaker investigates the largest flood of coal ash in United States history in 2008 as an event at once monumental and insignificant.
Jeremy Brice draws on ethnographic fieldwork among winemakers in South Australia to look at pasteurisation as a way to unsettle the assumption that only individual organisms can be killed, rendering other sites and spaces of killing visible.
Matthew MacLellan argues that Garrett Hardin’s primary object of critique in his influential “The Tragedy of the Commons” is not the commons or shared property at all—as is almost universally assumed by Hardin’s critics—but is rather Adam Smith’s theory of markets and its viability for protecting scarce resources.
Greear examines the contemporary trend toward de-industrialized and decentralized production and its implications for ecological sustainability. He suggests we can understand the potential positive ecological implications of such trends by reconceptualizing “incomplete information” in markets, which is often understood as a key way in which markets fail to solve or forestall environmental problems.
Affrica Taylor, Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, Sandrina de Finney, and Mindy Blaise edit and introduce a special section on “Inheriting the Ecological Legacies of Settler Colonialism.” The three essays that follow ponder the question of ecological inheritance in the settler colonial contexts of Canada and Australia, cognizant of the fact that settler colonialism remains an incomplete project.
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 article for a Special Section on “Inheriting the Ecological Legacies of Settler Colonialism,” Alexander R. D. Zahara and Myra J. Hird explore the ways in which western and Inuit cosmologies differentially inform particular relationships with the inhuman, and “trash animals” in particular. They compare vermin control practiced in Canada’s waste sites with the freedom of ravens to explore waste sites within Inuit communities, arguing that waste and wasting exist within a complex set of historically embedded and contemporaneously contested neo-colonial structures and processes.
In this review essay, Jennifer Hamilton responds to Michael Marder’s book, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (2013), exploring three of Marder’s concepts, plant “nourishment,” “desire” and “language,” through readings of Gabrielle de Vietri’s installation The Garden of Bad Flowers (2014), the story of Daphne from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 CE) and Alice’s encounter with talking flowers in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871).
In this Special Commentary Section titled “Replies to An Ecomodernist Manifesto,” edited by Eileen Crist and Thom Van Dooren, Bruno Latour explores the political import of the notion of “ecomodernism.”
In this Special Commentary Section titled “Replies to An Ecomodernist Manifesto,” edited by Eileen Crist and Thom Van Dooren, Rosemary-Claire Collard, Jessica Dempsey, and Juanita Sundberg critique the manifesto as fostering amnesia: amnesia about the uneven and violent nature of modernization as well as about the struggles that have underpinned efforts to alleviate inequality and violence.