Shannon Cram explores the slippery subjectivities of nuclear waste and nature at Washington State’s Hanford Nuclear Reservation, examining how this space is framed as both pristine habitat and waste frontier. She examines Hanford’s biological vector control program through the fruit fly and discusses how vector control uses instances of nuclear trespass to articulate the boundary between contaminated and uncontaminated. She concludes that nature is being recruited to do what the U.S. Department of Energy cannot: solve Hanford’s nuclear waste problem.
Content Index
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.
The author argues that the uncritical acceptance of the idea “invasions” of introduced organisms are the “second greatest threat” to species extinction exemplifies confirmation bias in scientific advocacy.
This 1880 map centered on Chicago displays the early CB&Q railroad route.
ENHANCE is a four-year innovative training network (ITN) funded by Marie Skłodowska Curie that is dedicated to further establishing the Environmental Humanities as a field of cutting-edge scholarship in Europe and further afield.
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.
Szerszynski’s article for the Special Commentary section of Environmental Humanities explores Pope Francis’s Laudato si’, particularly his call for a new “geo-spiritual formation.”
The Nordic Network for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies (NIES) promotes interdisciplinary environmental studies, especially work in the environmental humanities. The network is supported by NordForsk, and is based in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Iceland.
The aim of the Humanities for the Environment Observatories (HfE) is to identify, explore, and demonstrate the contributions that humanistic and artistic disciplines make to solving global social and environmental challenges.
Through a case study of the “invasive alien species” (IAS) narrative in South Africa, Susanna Lidström, Simon West, Tania Katzschner, M. Isabel Pérez-Ramos, and Hedley Twidle suggest that IAS oversimplifies the webs of ecological, biological, economic, and cultural relations to a simple “good” versus “bad” battle between easily discernible “natural” and “nonnatural” identities.