Pub Date : 2022-08-09DOI: 10.1177/25148486221115955
Thai Nguyen-Van-Quoc, Ethemcan Turhan, R. Holzhacker
This paper aims to explore how under authoritarian regimes, undergoing reform processes, divergent forms of environmental activism may emerge. Two severe cases of environmental degradation serve as our starting points: the marine disaster in the central coast of Vietnam in 2016 and the Mekong Delta's ongoing environmental degradation. While the former offers a case of rural grievances over mass fish death in Central Vietnam triggering protests on a national scale, the latter presents a continuum of environmental changes leading to serious impacts on deltaic livelihoods, albeit with no observable efforts of activism compared to the situation in other countries along the Mekong Delta. Drawing from in-depth interviews and participant observation with NGO workers in Vietnam who focus on environment and community development, we unravel the conditions, methods and rationalities behind their engagement (or lack thereof) with environmental activism in each case. We argue that the difference between the cases can be explained by tracing the process of politicising environmental grievances, taking into consideration culinary nationalism, anti-China nationalism and political opportunities under authoritarianism. Moving beyond current literature on activism under authoritarian regimes which relies mainly on institutional and/or social network approaches, our analysis helps further shed light on how contemporary environmental activism is mobilised in Vietnam from a geographically and politically grounded as well as culturally embedded position.
{"title":"Activism and non-activism: The politics of claiming environmental justice in Vietnam","authors":"Thai Nguyen-Van-Quoc, Ethemcan Turhan, R. Holzhacker","doi":"10.1177/25148486221115955","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486221115955","url":null,"abstract":"This paper aims to explore how under authoritarian regimes, undergoing reform processes, divergent forms of environmental activism may emerge. Two severe cases of environmental degradation serve as our starting points: the marine disaster in the central coast of Vietnam in 2016 and the Mekong Delta's ongoing environmental degradation. While the former offers a case of rural grievances over mass fish death in Central Vietnam triggering protests on a national scale, the latter presents a continuum of environmental changes leading to serious impacts on deltaic livelihoods, albeit with no observable efforts of activism compared to the situation in other countries along the Mekong Delta. Drawing from in-depth interviews and participant observation with NGO workers in Vietnam who focus on environment and community development, we unravel the conditions, methods and rationalities behind their engagement (or lack thereof) with environmental activism in each case. We argue that the difference between the cases can be explained by tracing the process of politicising environmental grievances, taking into consideration culinary nationalism, anti-China nationalism and political opportunities under authoritarianism. Moving beyond current literature on activism under authoritarian regimes which relies mainly on institutional and/or social network approaches, our analysis helps further shed light on how contemporary environmental activism is mobilised in Vietnam from a geographically and politically grounded as well as culturally embedded position.","PeriodicalId":11723,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning. E, Nature and Space","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2022-08-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82993735","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-08-09DOI: 10.1177/25148486221117947
M. Bell
Canada's siting process for spent nuclear fuel, led by the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO), is frequently held within nuclear industry spheres as an exemplary siting process, designed to be inclusive, participatory, and “community-driven.” Drawing from ethnographic observations of the process as it unfolded in Southern Ontario, Canada, this paper focuses on the epistemic issues of how diverse knowledges are treated in the process, whose knowledge is valued, how such knowledges are understood, and whose knowledges are excluded. In particular, I make sense of how epistemic tensions in the process are produced by being situated within a nuclear landscape, informed by local nuclear-dominant socio-technical relations and epistemic regimes, which exceptionalize pro-nuclear Western scientific knowledges. This socio-technical constellation, I suggest, leads to careful but sometimes paradoxical negotiations of the expert/lay divide that subsequently reveals cracks in the policy foundation for inclusion of diverse forms of knowledge. While the NWMO policy framework discursively values diverse knowledges, critical lay community knowledges are often delegitimized and dismissed. Similarly, there are scalar issues in the ways Indigenous knowledges are homogenized and devalued through discursive separation. These epistemic tensions, between how knowledges should be treated in policy, and how knowledges are actually treated in practice, demonstrate clear issues of recognition justice, participatory fairness, and inclusion of diverse knowledges. The implications of this work shed light on understanding the complexities of landscape-based knowledge politics and how they might inform siting practices and technological decision-making more broadly.
{"title":"The epistemic tensions of nuclear waste siting in a nuclear landscape","authors":"M. Bell","doi":"10.1177/25148486221117947","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486221117947","url":null,"abstract":"Canada's siting process for spent nuclear fuel, led by the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO), is frequently held within nuclear industry spheres as an exemplary siting process, designed to be inclusive, participatory, and “community-driven.” Drawing from ethnographic observations of the process as it unfolded in Southern Ontario, Canada, this paper focuses on the epistemic issues of how diverse knowledges are treated in the process, whose knowledge is valued, how such knowledges are understood, and whose knowledges are excluded. In particular, I make sense of how epistemic tensions in the process are produced by being situated within a nuclear landscape, informed by local nuclear-dominant socio-technical relations and epistemic regimes, which exceptionalize pro-nuclear Western scientific knowledges. This socio-technical constellation, I suggest, leads to careful but sometimes paradoxical negotiations of the expert/lay divide that subsequently reveals cracks in the policy foundation for inclusion of diverse forms of knowledge. While the NWMO policy framework discursively values diverse knowledges, critical lay community knowledges are often delegitimized and dismissed. Similarly, there are scalar issues in the ways Indigenous knowledges are homogenized and devalued through discursive separation. These epistemic tensions, between how knowledges should be treated in policy, and how knowledges are actually treated in practice, demonstrate clear issues of recognition justice, participatory fairness, and inclusion of diverse knowledges. The implications of this work shed light on understanding the complexities of landscape-based knowledge politics and how they might inform siting practices and technological decision-making more broadly.","PeriodicalId":11723,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning. E, Nature and Space","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2022-08-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89599067","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-08-02DOI: 10.1177/25148486221115949
Silvia Flaminio, J. S. Cavin, M. Moretti
This paper investigates urban imaginaries conveyed in publications in ecology over the past century. We examine some urban ecologists’ view that urban areas have been disregarded by ecology due to negative views on cities and urbanisation. Inspired by previous work on imaginaries in social and cultural geography and political ecology, and by textual data analysis methods, we adopted a methodological framework that applies both quantitative and qualitative methods in the analysis of a corpus of 960 articles (published 1922–2018) drawn from 10 long-standing international journals in ecology. Our hypothesis is that ecology has embraced an anti-urban imaginary that is manifested in urban invisibility as well as the recurrent expression of negative ideas about cities (constituting an ‘anti-urban bias’). Our results partially confirm this hypothesis. We show that until the 1970s only a few papers were published on cities. We identify nine main themes relating to cities around which ideas about cities have been constructed (threats, pests, refuges, fragmentation, gradients, pollution, homogenisation, planetary urbanisation, and planning) and show how these ideas have been mobilised in the articles since the 1920s. We discuss the way in which these evolving ideas reflect a move from an essentially anti-urban imaginary to a more complex and ambivalent one. This shift coincides with the rise of the idea of planetary urbanisation in ecological publications, increasing recommendations regarding urban planning, and more generally, growing conceptual debates on the ecological impact of cities.
{"title":"Is ecology anti-urban? Urban ideas and imaginaries across one hundred years of ecological publications","authors":"Silvia Flaminio, J. S. Cavin, M. Moretti","doi":"10.1177/25148486221115949","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486221115949","url":null,"abstract":"This paper investigates urban imaginaries conveyed in publications in ecology over the past century. We examine some urban ecologists’ view that urban areas have been disregarded by ecology due to negative views on cities and urbanisation. Inspired by previous work on imaginaries in social and cultural geography and political ecology, and by textual data analysis methods, we adopted a methodological framework that applies both quantitative and qualitative methods in the analysis of a corpus of 960 articles (published 1922–2018) drawn from 10 long-standing international journals in ecology. Our hypothesis is that ecology has embraced an anti-urban imaginary that is manifested in urban invisibility as well as the recurrent expression of negative ideas about cities (constituting an ‘anti-urban bias’). Our results partially confirm this hypothesis. We show that until the 1970s only a few papers were published on cities. We identify nine main themes relating to cities around which ideas about cities have been constructed (threats, pests, refuges, fragmentation, gradients, pollution, homogenisation, planetary urbanisation, and planning) and show how these ideas have been mobilised in the articles since the 1920s. We discuss the way in which these evolving ideas reflect a move from an essentially anti-urban imaginary to a more complex and ambivalent one. This shift coincides with the rise of the idea of planetary urbanisation in ecological publications, increasing recommendations regarding urban planning, and more generally, growing conceptual debates on the ecological impact of cities.","PeriodicalId":11723,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning. E, Nature and Space","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2022-08-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78565827","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-26DOI: 10.1177/25148486221113963
N. Senanayake
This article argues for a more rigorous engagement with intersectionality within political ecologies of health. Building on the work of feminist scholars who explore the co-production of social and ecological differences, I examine how health improvement schemes that target practices of natural resource use concentrate value (economic and ecological) and health dividends in particular bodies at the expense of others. As part of this intervention, I draw on long-term and ongoing ethnographic research in north-central Sri Lanka. This region is an endemic zone for a mysterious and deadly form of kidney disease (CKDu) as well as the site of frenzied health improvement intervention. Specifically, and in response to scientific studies that link kidney disease to agrochemical use and drinking water, an increasingly diverse range of actors, from different branches of the state apparatus to private industries and civil society organizations, have invested heavily in reconfiguring the region’s water supply infrastructure and agrarian landscapes. Through an analysis of resident testimonies, I demonstrate that the burden of subsidizing these new “healthful” practices of water provision and agricultural production is unevenly experienced, as are residents’ abilities to adopt and maintain them over time and space. More crucially, I illustrate how schemes designed to heal turn on the production of differentiated harms, including new gendered labor burdens for poor women, and intensified agrochemical use for ecologically and economically resource-poor farmers. Developing these narratives toward a feminist political ecology of health, I demonstrate how social, ecological, and bodily differences intersect to constitute new patterns of health and harm in the dry zone. I conclude by reflecting on how this approach can explain the paradoxical effects of well-intentioned disease mitigation strategies.
{"title":"Towards a feminist political ecology of health: Mystery kidney disease and the co-production of social, environmental, and bodily difference","authors":"N. Senanayake","doi":"10.1177/25148486221113963","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486221113963","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues for a more rigorous engagement with intersectionality within political ecologies of health. Building on the work of feminist scholars who explore the co-production of social and ecological differences, I examine how health improvement schemes that target practices of natural resource use concentrate value (economic and ecological) and health dividends in particular bodies at the expense of others. As part of this intervention, I draw on long-term and ongoing ethnographic research in north-central Sri Lanka. This region is an endemic zone for a mysterious and deadly form of kidney disease (CKDu) as well as the site of frenzied health improvement intervention. Specifically, and in response to scientific studies that link kidney disease to agrochemical use and drinking water, an increasingly diverse range of actors, from different branches of the state apparatus to private industries and civil society organizations, have invested heavily in reconfiguring the region’s water supply infrastructure and agrarian landscapes. Through an analysis of resident testimonies, I demonstrate that the burden of subsidizing these new “healthful” practices of water provision and agricultural production is unevenly experienced, as are residents’ abilities to adopt and maintain them over time and space. More crucially, I illustrate how schemes designed to heal turn on the production of differentiated harms, including new gendered labor burdens for poor women, and intensified agrochemical use for ecologically and economically resource-poor farmers. Developing these narratives toward a feminist political ecology of health, I demonstrate how social, ecological, and bodily differences intersect to constitute new patterns of health and harm in the dry zone. I conclude by reflecting on how this approach can explain the paradoxical effects of well-intentioned disease mitigation strategies.","PeriodicalId":11723,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning. E, Nature and Space","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2022-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90441106","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-25DOI: 10.1177/25148486221115950
Eugene J. McCann, N. McClintock, Christiana E. Miewald
This paper addresses the alliance between some urban agriculturalists, developers, and the local state in promoting a certain type of ‘green urbanism’ through what we call ‘impermaculture’. Impermaculture is a model of urban agriculture whereby some urban farmers approach their impermanence – the possibility of their operations being replaced by higher value developments – less as a threat to be avoided, as traditionally understood in the literature, and more as an intended modus operandi to which they are committed. We discuss how they use lightweight and portable growing containers, planter beds, greenhouses, and livestock pens to operate within and enhance contemporary regimes of development in global North cities. We identify a spatio-temporal impermanence that stands in contrast to classic understandings of sustainability fixes as either a form of greenwashing or as spatial fixes involving the sinking of capital into construction of a ‘greener’ built environment. In what follows, we develop a conceptual framework that will facilitate these contributions and provide a language for discussing cases of impermaculture in Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, British Columbia. We discuss how urban agriculture is mobilized as part of the sustainability fix in the two cities. We first demonstrate how impermaculture emerges as a means of stabilizing the fix which is always prone to coming apart, or fracturing. We then draw on two examples – goat husbandry in Portland and temporary gardens in Vancouver – to demonstrate how urban agriculturalists are embracing and leveraging impermanence. This ‘impermaculture by design’ not only marks a new form of urban agriculture in the neoliberal city but shores up and temporally rescales the sustainability fix while providing urban agriculture initiatives stability.
{"title":"Mobilizing ‘impermaculture’: Temporary urban agriculture and the sustainability fix","authors":"Eugene J. McCann, N. McClintock, Christiana E. Miewald","doi":"10.1177/25148486221115950","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486221115950","url":null,"abstract":"This paper addresses the alliance between some urban agriculturalists, developers, and the local state in promoting a certain type of ‘green urbanism’ through what we call ‘impermaculture’. Impermaculture is a model of urban agriculture whereby some urban farmers approach their impermanence – the possibility of their operations being replaced by higher value developments – less as a threat to be avoided, as traditionally understood in the literature, and more as an intended modus operandi to which they are committed. We discuss how they use lightweight and portable growing containers, planter beds, greenhouses, and livestock pens to operate within and enhance contemporary regimes of development in global North cities. We identify a spatio-temporal impermanence that stands in contrast to classic understandings of sustainability fixes as either a form of greenwashing or as spatial fixes involving the sinking of capital into construction of a ‘greener’ built environment. In what follows, we develop a conceptual framework that will facilitate these contributions and provide a language for discussing cases of impermaculture in Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, British Columbia. We discuss how urban agriculture is mobilized as part of the sustainability fix in the two cities. We first demonstrate how impermaculture emerges as a means of stabilizing the fix which is always prone to coming apart, or fracturing. We then draw on two examples – goat husbandry in Portland and temporary gardens in Vancouver – to demonstrate how urban agriculturalists are embracing and leveraging impermanence. This ‘impermaculture by design’ not only marks a new form of urban agriculture in the neoliberal city but shores up and temporally rescales the sustainability fix while providing urban agriculture initiatives stability.","PeriodicalId":11723,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning. E, Nature and Space","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2022-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80235645","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-25DOI: 10.1177/25148486221113557
Carly E. Nichols
Across India, many farmers contend that synthetic nitrogenous fertilizers do more than impact soils, but also lead to tasteless food crops and weakened bodies more susceptible to aches, pains, and diseases. Although these complaints, long-documented across South Asia, have been theorized as embodied critiques of development or as reflecting hybrid epistemologies, there has been strikingly little focus on the potential biophysical currents that may underpin these perceptions of fertilizer harm. This paper works to fill this gap, analyzing qualitative data collected from farmers in two remote eastern Indian districts using an “integrated” political ecology of health (PEH) framework that utilizes two main approaches to examine bodily materiality and health. In particular, the framework looks at the multi-scalar political economies, cultural forms of meaning-making, as well as the visceral, affective ways that respondents come to see synthetic fertilizers as the cause of barren lands, tasteless foods, and weakened bodies. The article then deploys a critical reading of bioscientific literature to interpret respondent narratives and zoom in onto potential bio-social mechanisms that may help illuminate claims of fertilizer harm in new ways. In particular, I present evidence around how phytochemicals—literally chemicals produced by plants—may shift due to chemical fertilizer use in ways that may matter for hunger and health. Yet, not losing sight of the affective ways crops are grown, consumed, and discussed, I also highlight research examining how beliefs and perceptions measurably modify physiological responses to food in positive or adverse ways through the still ill-understood placebo/nocebo effect. The goal of such analysis is not to present a tidy conclusion to questions of fertilizer–health connections but demonstrate how a PEH that remains attentive to power, discourse, and materiality can bring disparate streams of thought together to forge pathways for transdisciplinary research and practice.
{"title":"Inflammatory agriculture: Political ecologies of health and fertilizers in India","authors":"Carly E. Nichols","doi":"10.1177/25148486221113557","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486221113557","url":null,"abstract":"Across India, many farmers contend that synthetic nitrogenous fertilizers do more than impact soils, but also lead to tasteless food crops and weakened bodies more susceptible to aches, pains, and diseases. Although these complaints, long-documented across South Asia, have been theorized as embodied critiques of development or as reflecting hybrid epistemologies, there has been strikingly little focus on the potential biophysical currents that may underpin these perceptions of fertilizer harm. This paper works to fill this gap, analyzing qualitative data collected from farmers in two remote eastern Indian districts using an “integrated” political ecology of health (PEH) framework that utilizes two main approaches to examine bodily materiality and health. In particular, the framework looks at the multi-scalar political economies, cultural forms of meaning-making, as well as the visceral, affective ways that respondents come to see synthetic fertilizers as the cause of barren lands, tasteless foods, and weakened bodies. The article then deploys a critical reading of bioscientific literature to interpret respondent narratives and zoom in onto potential bio-social mechanisms that may help illuminate claims of fertilizer harm in new ways. In particular, I present evidence around how phytochemicals—literally chemicals produced by plants—may shift due to chemical fertilizer use in ways that may matter for hunger and health. Yet, not losing sight of the affective ways crops are grown, consumed, and discussed, I also highlight research examining how beliefs and perceptions measurably modify physiological responses to food in positive or adverse ways through the still ill-understood placebo/nocebo effect. The goal of such analysis is not to present a tidy conclusion to questions of fertilizer–health connections but demonstrate how a PEH that remains attentive to power, discourse, and materiality can bring disparate streams of thought together to forge pathways for transdisciplinary research and practice.","PeriodicalId":11723,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning. E, Nature and Space","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2022-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90597353","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-18DOI: 10.1177/25148486221113308
U. Balderson
The trajectory of socio-environmental conflicts remains difficult to predict. In the case study explored in this article, attention to the emergence of emotional subjectivities helps us better understand the timing of the conflict and the style of contestation at the site. The data are drawn from interviews and observations of the ‘dialogue table’ meetings that took place between representatives from the BarrickGold run Pierina mine in Ancash, a highland area in Peru, and the nearby village of Mataquita to try and resolve a conflict over access to water. The paper identifies three ways that the emotional climate at the site influenced the conflict trajectory. Firstly, it was heightened fear for future water availability and increased feelings of hope that the mining company could be held to account for the hydrosphere disruption that triggered the conflict. Secondly, the Mataquitans tried to elicit feelings of compassion in mining company representatives whilst the company acted to repress them, fearing that they could endanger profit-making at the site. Finally, the inconsistent behaviour of the mining company and their ad hoc Corporate Social Responsibility allocations produced a moral-emotional critique of mine behaviour and a climate of distrust within and between villages. The emotions produced by interactions between actors reduced the likelihood of a more coordinated response to the problems at the site, conveniently serving the agenda of the mine.
{"title":"Emotional subjectivities and the trajectory of a Peruvian mining conflict","authors":"U. Balderson","doi":"10.1177/25148486221113308","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486221113308","url":null,"abstract":"The trajectory of socio-environmental conflicts remains difficult to predict. In the case study explored in this article, attention to the emergence of emotional subjectivities helps us better understand the timing of the conflict and the style of contestation at the site. The data are drawn from interviews and observations of the ‘dialogue table’ meetings that took place between representatives from the BarrickGold run Pierina mine in Ancash, a highland area in Peru, and the nearby village of Mataquita to try and resolve a conflict over access to water. The paper identifies three ways that the emotional climate at the site influenced the conflict trajectory. Firstly, it was heightened fear for future water availability and increased feelings of hope that the mining company could be held to account for the hydrosphere disruption that triggered the conflict. Secondly, the Mataquitans tried to elicit feelings of compassion in mining company representatives whilst the company acted to repress them, fearing that they could endanger profit-making at the site. Finally, the inconsistent behaviour of the mining company and their ad hoc Corporate Social Responsibility allocations produced a moral-emotional critique of mine behaviour and a climate of distrust within and between villages. The emotions produced by interactions between actors reduced the likelihood of a more coordinated response to the problems at the site, conveniently serving the agenda of the mine.","PeriodicalId":11723,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning. E, Nature and Space","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2022-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80224231","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-14DOI: 10.1177/25148486221111786
Lauren Drakopulos, Jennifer J. Silver, Eric Nost, Noella J. Gray, R. Hawkins
The number and variety of technologies used for environmental surveillance is expanding rapidly, making constant data collection and near ‘real time’ analyses possible. ‘Smart Earth’ describes networked infrastructures comprised of devices and equipment and signals to the human dimensions inherent to developing, deploying and putting technology and large datasets to use. In this paper, we situate Smart Earth in terms of technological products and human practices and consider the relationship between Smart Earth and global environmental governance. Specifically, we review emerging literature and present a case study of an organization founded by environmental non-profit, SkyTruth, tech industry behemoth, Google and marine conservation NGO, Oceana. Called ‘Global Fishing Watch’ (GFW), this organization builds geospatial datasets, hosts an online mapping platform where anyone with internet access can surveil various types of ocean-going vessels and shares data and map products with scientists and practitioners. Two critical points emerge through the case. First, we show that GFW expands its surveillance capacity by pursuing ‘data sharing’ partnerships with sovereign states, many in the Global South. Second, the maps and datasets produced by GFW link vessels to a ‘flag state’ while the firms, subsidiaries and financiers that may own and/or operate these vessels remain obscure – and hence so too does the political economy of oceans fisheries. GFW maps and datasets offer new approaches to tracking fishing and are advancing fisheries science. At the same time, they rely on and are only legible through hegemonic geopolitical and political–economic orders deeply implicated in industrial (over)fishing. The norms and domains of global environmental governance are expanding, but Smart Earth ‘solutions’ risk leaving the structural drivers of environmental change unaddressed.
{"title":"Making global oceans governance in/visible with Smart Earth: The case of Global Fishing Watch","authors":"Lauren Drakopulos, Jennifer J. Silver, Eric Nost, Noella J. Gray, R. Hawkins","doi":"10.1177/25148486221111786","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486221111786","url":null,"abstract":"The number and variety of technologies used for environmental surveillance is expanding rapidly, making constant data collection and near ‘real time’ analyses possible. ‘Smart Earth’ describes networked infrastructures comprised of devices and equipment and signals to the human dimensions inherent to developing, deploying and putting technology and large datasets to use. In this paper, we situate Smart Earth in terms of technological products and human practices and consider the relationship between Smart Earth and global environmental governance. Specifically, we review emerging literature and present a case study of an organization founded by environmental non-profit, SkyTruth, tech industry behemoth, Google and marine conservation NGO, Oceana. Called ‘Global Fishing Watch’ (GFW), this organization builds geospatial datasets, hosts an online mapping platform where anyone with internet access can surveil various types of ocean-going vessels and shares data and map products with scientists and practitioners. Two critical points emerge through the case. First, we show that GFW expands its surveillance capacity by pursuing ‘data sharing’ partnerships with sovereign states, many in the Global South. Second, the maps and datasets produced by GFW link vessels to a ‘flag state’ while the firms, subsidiaries and financiers that may own and/or operate these vessels remain obscure – and hence so too does the political economy of oceans fisheries. GFW maps and datasets offer new approaches to tracking fishing and are advancing fisheries science. At the same time, they rely on and are only legible through hegemonic geopolitical and political–economic orders deeply implicated in industrial (over)fishing. The norms and domains of global environmental governance are expanding, but Smart Earth ‘solutions’ risk leaving the structural drivers of environmental change unaddressed.","PeriodicalId":11723,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning. E, Nature and Space","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2022-07-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82757664","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-11DOI: 10.1177/25148486221111784
M. Bastian, Rowan Bayliss Hawitt
Many scholars have argued that climate change is, in part, a problem of time, with ecological, political and social systems thought to be out of sync or mistimed. Discussions of time and environment are often interdisciplinary, necessitating a wide-ranging use of methods and approaches. However, to date there has been practically no direct engagement with the scientific field of phenology, the study of life-cycle timing across species, including plants, animals and insects. In this article, we outline how phenology can offer novel inroads to thinking through temporal relations across species and environments. We suggest that greater engagement with this field will enable scholars working across the humanities and social sciences to incorporate detailed studies of environmental timings which shed light on individual species, as well as wide-ranging species interactions. Following an overview of phenological research from both western scientific and indigenous knowledge perspectives, we report on a scoping exercise looking at where phenology has appeared in environmental humanities literature to date. We then offer an illustration that puts phenological perspectives into conversation with plant studies in order to indicate some of the useful affordances phenological perspectives offer, namely those of comprehending time as co-constructed across species and as flexible and responsive to environmental changes. We conclude by offering a number of further potential connections and suggestions for future research, including calling for more exploration of how environmental humanities approaches might produce critical contributions to phenology in their turn.
{"title":"Multi-species, ecological and climate change temporalities: Opening a dialogue with phenology","authors":"M. Bastian, Rowan Bayliss Hawitt","doi":"10.1177/25148486221111784","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486221111784","url":null,"abstract":"Many scholars have argued that climate change is, in part, a problem of time, with ecological, political and social systems thought to be out of sync or mistimed. Discussions of time and environment are often interdisciplinary, necessitating a wide-ranging use of methods and approaches. However, to date there has been practically no direct engagement with the scientific field of phenology, the study of life-cycle timing across species, including plants, animals and insects. In this article, we outline how phenology can offer novel inroads to thinking through temporal relations across species and environments. We suggest that greater engagement with this field will enable scholars working across the humanities and social sciences to incorporate detailed studies of environmental timings which shed light on individual species, as well as wide-ranging species interactions. Following an overview of phenological research from both western scientific and indigenous knowledge perspectives, we report on a scoping exercise looking at where phenology has appeared in environmental humanities literature to date. We then offer an illustration that puts phenological perspectives into conversation with plant studies in order to indicate some of the useful affordances phenological perspectives offer, namely those of comprehending time as co-constructed across species and as flexible and responsive to environmental changes. We conclude by offering a number of further potential connections and suggestions for future research, including calling for more exploration of how environmental humanities approaches might produce critical contributions to phenology in their turn.","PeriodicalId":11723,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning. E, Nature and Space","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2022-07-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80624577","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-07DOI: 10.1177/25148486221108176
A. Ranjbar
In the mid-2000s, a social movement emerged in northwestern Iran to demand increased environmental protections for Lake Orumiyeh. Once among the largest saltwater lakes in the world, Lake Orumiyeh has undergone rapid desiccation, losing nearly 90 per cent of its surface area over the past two decades. Conceptually, the aim of this article is to examine how protesters in Orumiyeh used environmental justice, both as a concept and political strategy, to make human rights claims against the Iranian state. I posit that environmental justice functions as a coded language in this political context, where it is challenging to speak openly about human rights. Drawing from environmental justice and critical human rights literature in geography, combined with an empirical and visual analysis of protests to save Lake Orumiyeh, I analyze how protesters strategically ‘greened’ the language of human rights to protect themselves from state violence. I compare two protests organized in 2010 and 2011 to demonstrate how the site of the lake was used to signify broader grievances against the state. Through a comparison of the affective tone and state response to the protests, I explicate both the importance and the limits of ‘greening’ human rights as a protest strategy. Taken together, these case studies illustrate how limiting activism to binary frameworks of the environmental or political renders invisible the multidimensional claims of protesters. My study demonstrates the importance of widening our analytical gaze to incorporate protests that register rights claims outside of the normative framework of human rights, thereby accounting for political contexts where alternative rights narratives are both strategic and necessary.
{"title":"The greening of human rights in Iran: Lake Orumiyeh, human rights, and environmental justice","authors":"A. Ranjbar","doi":"10.1177/25148486221108176","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486221108176","url":null,"abstract":"In the mid-2000s, a social movement emerged in northwestern Iran to demand increased environmental protections for Lake Orumiyeh. Once among the largest saltwater lakes in the world, Lake Orumiyeh has undergone rapid desiccation, losing nearly 90 per cent of its surface area over the past two decades. Conceptually, the aim of this article is to examine how protesters in Orumiyeh used environmental justice, both as a concept and political strategy, to make human rights claims against the Iranian state. I posit that environmental justice functions as a coded language in this political context, where it is challenging to speak openly about human rights. Drawing from environmental justice and critical human rights literature in geography, combined with an empirical and visual analysis of protests to save Lake Orumiyeh, I analyze how protesters strategically ‘greened’ the language of human rights to protect themselves from state violence. I compare two protests organized in 2010 and 2011 to demonstrate how the site of the lake was used to signify broader grievances against the state. Through a comparison of the affective tone and state response to the protests, I explicate both the importance and the limits of ‘greening’ human rights as a protest strategy. Taken together, these case studies illustrate how limiting activism to binary frameworks of the environmental or political renders invisible the multidimensional claims of protesters. My study demonstrates the importance of widening our analytical gaze to incorporate protests that register rights claims outside of the normative framework of human rights, thereby accounting for political contexts where alternative rights narratives are both strategic and necessary.","PeriodicalId":11723,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning. E, Nature and Space","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2022-07-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86853256","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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