science

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.

Bradley M. Jones explores the cultivation of life in ruins, through a multi-species ecological ethic revealed in the life and labor of a permaculture farmer in the Appalachian foothills.

In this introduction to a special section on toxic embodiment, Olga Cielemęcka and Cecilia Åsberg examine variously situated bodies, land- and waterscapes, and their naturalcultural interactions with toxicity.

Through an ethnographic account about the use of an electromagnetic water system in the Amish community, Nicole Welk-Joerger explores the conceptual meeting ground between sacred and secular worldviews in efforts that address the Anthropocene.

Triangulating narratives from a prospective mining site in northern Norway, Hugo Reinert works to identify (and render graspable) a particular effect of retroactive shock—tracing its resonance through experiences of chemical exposure, colonial racism, cultural erasure, and destruction of the built environment.

This collection of studies provides valuable historical contexts for making sense of contemporary environmental challenges facing Latin America.

In this article, Sasha Litvintseva examines the history and materiality of asbestos to theorize toxic embodiment through the mutuality of the haptic sense and the breaching of boundaries of inside and outside. She develops this through an analysis of her own film project Asbestos (2016), shot at the mining town of Asbestos, Quebec.

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.