In this selection of poems, Adam Dickinson focuses on the “outside” that is the “inside,” thereby drawing attention to the coextensive and intra-active nature of the body with its environment and the consequent implications for linking the human to the nonhuman and the personal to the global in environmental ethics.
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.
Paul Crutzen at the University of Helsinki in May 2010
Paul Crutzen at the University of Helsinki in May 2010
Created by Teemu Rajala (2010). View image source.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Born in 1933 in Amsterdam, Crutzen studied engineering before turning to atmospheric science. His research specialties include the ozone hole, nuclear winter, and global environmental change.
Together with the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, the Deutsches Museum hosted a major special exhibition on the Anthropocene from December 2014 – September 2016, which was curated by Nina Möllers. Coined by the atmospheric chemist and Nobel Prize laureate Paul J. Crutzen, the term “Anthropocene” describes the idea of a new geological era shaped by deep interventions into nature by humans as biological and geological agents.
Nina Möllers
Using the Central Coast of California as a case study, this article argues that a nexus of ambitious growers and a growing state agricultural bureaucracy worked to create a “brand name” and teach cultivation approaches with increased production and expanded markets. But these same actors also made efforts to keep the long-term health of the industry and the community in mind.
The Sydney Tar Ponds are a huge waste site in Nova Scotia, Canada that contains large amounts of toxic chemicals. The ponds formed in a river mouth, where steel corporations let their largely coal-based pollutants and sludge drain off for many decades.
The Haber Process is a chemical process that converts ammonia into nitrogen and oxygen gas. Nitrogen is an extremely potent fertilizer, and prior to its chemical mass production, was only available in bird and bat feces. The invention of this process and its large-scale use starting in 1913 revolutionized agriculture around the world.
After decades of precious metal recovery and recycling on the Evor-Phillips Leasing site, the EPA tested and found high levels of volatile organic compounds and heavy metals in the site’s soil, surface water, and groundwater, including the nearby marsh and wetlands.
This project examines the history and legacy of arsenic contamination at Giant Mine, a large gold mine located on the Ingraham Trail just outside of Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada.
