In this commentary, Bejoy Thomas, Soumyajit Bhar, and Shoibal Chakravarty caution against optimistic narratives of environmental revival.

In this episode from the New Books Network podcast, Nadia Y. Kim is interviewed on her recent book, Refusing Death: Immigrant Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice in LA.

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.

This editorial note introduces the four major conference themes of the 5th International Water History Association (IWHA) Conference ‘Pasts and Futures of Water’ in June 2007: (i) water, health and sanitation; (ii) water, food and economy; (iii) water and the city; and (iv) water governance and policy.