science

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.

Miriam Tola explores the entwinement of fascist biopolitics and the chemical industry at the site of the former chemical-textile plant Ex-SNIA Viscosa from the 1920s to the 1950s, and how this affected human and nonhuman bodies.

Tracing ticks in two different artworks and Leslie Feinberg’s activist writing, Wibke Straube takes their lead in this article from philosopher Donna Haraway and her suggestion to think about engagement with the environment through an “ethics of response-ability.”

In the afterword of a special section on toxic embodiment, Stacy Alaimo distills the collection’s argument for attending to the ways environments, human bodies, and nonhuman bodies are transformed by anthropogenic substances.

In a special section entitled “Living Lexicon for the Environmental Humanities,” Sara J. Grossman reflects on the definition of disability and disabled communities within environmental humanities.

This book reveals how IUCN experts struggled to make global schemes for nature conservation a central concern for UNESCO, UNEP and other intergovernmental organizations.