Wasser correlates the control of water supply with power in a comparative collection of articles on water in ancient, early modern, and modern states.
Gay Hawkins puts the ethical significance of waste in everyday life into historical, social, and cultural perspective, seeking to change ecologically destructive practices without recourse to guilt, moralism, or despair.
Gregg Mitman examines the relationship between issues in early twentieth-century American society and the sciences of evolution and ecology to reveal how explicit social and political concerns influenced the scientific agenda of biologists at the University of Chicago and throughout the United States during the first half of the twentieth century.
This collection contributes a sustained analysis of the beginning of major Canadian environmental debates between the 1960s and 1980s, and examines a range of issues related to broad environmental concerns, topics which emerged as key concerns in the context of Cold War military investments and experiments, the oil crisis of the 1970s, debates over gendered roles, and the increasing attention to urban pollution and pesticide use.
Northern Canada’s distinctive landscapes, its complex social relations and the contested place of the North in contemporary political, military, scientific and economic affairs have fueled recent scholarly discussion. At the same time, both the media and the wider public have shown increasing interest in the region. This collection extends our understanding of the environmental history of northern Canada—clarifying both its practice and promise, and providing critical perspectives on current public debates.
Jennifer Clapp examines the nature of international trade in toxic waste and the roles of multinational corporations and environmental NGOs. Waste transfer has become a routine practice for firms in industrialized countries and poor countries accept these imports but struggle to manage the materials safely. She argues that governments have failed to recognize the voices of protest.
In Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene, Joanna Zylinska outlies an ethical framework that could help humans assume responsibility for various occurrences in the universe across different scales. Her goal is not so much to tell us how to live but rather to allow us to rethink “life” and what we can do with it, in whatever time we have left. The book embraces a speculative mode of thinking that is more akin to the artist’s method; it also includes a photographic project by the author.
Manifesto for Living in the Anthropocene argues that the current climate crisis calls for new ways of thinking and producing knowledge, suggesting that our collective inclination has been to go on in an experimental and exploratory mode, in which we refuse to foreclose on options or jump too quickly to “solutions.”
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.
Drawing on Continental theory and various cultural objects, On an Ungrounded Earth constructs an eclectic geosophy describing Earth as a dynamic engine materially invading and upsetting our attempts to reduce it to merely the ground beneath our feet.
