Pub Date : 2023-12-18DOI: 10.1177/25148486231221020
Johanna Kramm
Over the past decades, a new field of research related to microplastics has emerged which still faces a high degree of uncertainty and conflicting views regarding the risks posed by microplastics. To date, social research has not addressed the regulatory science practices necessary for assessing the risks created by microplastics and related ethical questions. Therefore, the objective of this article is to analyse the role of central regulatory science practices, that is, risk assessments as they relate to microplastics. I draw on the work of Karen Barad to conceptualise these regulatory science practices as boundary-drawing practices which produce agential cuts. I will show that scientific and regulatory boundary-drawing practices draw agential cuts determining the properties of microplastics and regulatory actions that have ‘real’ consequences for human and environmental health. My empirical case demonstrates that different versions of risk assessment exist – one based on thresholds and the other on persistence – each of which have different regulatory consequences. Threshold risk assessment does not legitimise action to regulate microplastics, because the threshold at which microplastics have toxic effects requires such high concentrations that industry could continue to emit microplastics for decades. Therefore, only risk assessments that relate to the materiality of microplastics in terms of persistence and accumulation legitimise regulatory action.
{"title":"Agential cuts of regulatory science practices – the case of microplastics","authors":"Johanna Kramm","doi":"10.1177/25148486231221020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486231221020","url":null,"abstract":"Over the past decades, a new field of research related to microplastics has emerged which still faces a high degree of uncertainty and conflicting views regarding the risks posed by microplastics. To date, social research has not addressed the regulatory science practices necessary for assessing the risks created by microplastics and related ethical questions. Therefore, the objective of this article is to analyse the role of central regulatory science practices, that is, risk assessments as they relate to microplastics. I draw on the work of Karen Barad to conceptualise these regulatory science practices as boundary-drawing practices which produce agential cuts. I will show that scientific and regulatory boundary-drawing practices draw agential cuts determining the properties of microplastics and regulatory actions that have ‘real’ consequences for human and environmental health. My empirical case demonstrates that different versions of risk assessment exist – one based on thresholds and the other on persistence – each of which have different regulatory consequences. Threshold risk assessment does not legitimise action to regulate microplastics, because the threshold at which microplastics have toxic effects requires such high concentrations that industry could continue to emit microplastics for decades. Therefore, only risk assessments that relate to the materiality of microplastics in terms of persistence and accumulation legitimise regulatory action.","PeriodicalId":507916,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space","volume":"51 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139172855","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-17DOI: 10.1177/25148486231219156
Lesley Green
Muizenberg East, in Cape Town, South Africa, is a peri-urban landscape that encompasses sewage works, tourist beaches, a nature reserve, a waste dump, a Ramsar site for the protection of migrating birds, shack settlements, and a corporate office park. The complex and contradictory uses of this land demonstrate the limitations of social-ecological analysis and ecosystem service approaches to environmental governance. Mapping contemporary struggles over food, housing, aquifer contamination, air pollution, conservation space, safety, and farmland, the study proposes that a new materialist approach combining emerging transdisciplinary fields that focus on material flows and metabolism offers a big-picture science for landscape diagnostics and repair. It is argued that the Earth processes such as metabolism, thermodynamics, and flow offer an integrative basis for environmental governance based on partnerships with Earth processes. Such a constitutional shift in approaches to local governance offers the possibility of amplifying habitability without inserting new modes of profit-taking into the web of life.
{"title":"Material flows as Earth politics: Concepts, methods, and approaches for transdisciplinary diagnostics and repair at Muizenberg East, Cape Town","authors":"Lesley Green","doi":"10.1177/25148486231219156","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486231219156","url":null,"abstract":"Muizenberg East, in Cape Town, South Africa, is a peri-urban landscape that encompasses sewage works, tourist beaches, a nature reserve, a waste dump, a Ramsar site for the protection of migrating birds, shack settlements, and a corporate office park. The complex and contradictory uses of this land demonstrate the limitations of social-ecological analysis and ecosystem service approaches to environmental governance. Mapping contemporary struggles over food, housing, aquifer contamination, air pollution, conservation space, safety, and farmland, the study proposes that a new materialist approach combining emerging transdisciplinary fields that focus on material flows and metabolism offers a big-picture science for landscape diagnostics and repair. It is argued that the Earth processes such as metabolism, thermodynamics, and flow offer an integrative basis for environmental governance based on partnerships with Earth processes. Such a constitutional shift in approaches to local governance offers the possibility of amplifying habitability without inserting new modes of profit-taking into the web of life.","PeriodicalId":507916,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space","volume":"69 ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139176667","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-17DOI: 10.1177/25148486231221021
E. von Essen, David Redmalm
Urban areas are a messy more-than-human interface for humans and synanthropic wildlife. Norms for what constitutes a ‘problem’ animal to be culled, a displaced animal to be rescued, or a species nuisance whom one simply has to let live, are undergoing rapid change. We investigate the changing expectations that municipal hunters experience that they have from society in relation to managing problem wildlife in cities. Adding to the literature on the constitution of ‘problem’ animals in human environments, we show what happens to these animals in the practical sense, and what informs this decision. Our point of departure is to ask by what rationales hunters consider lethal interventions in urban nature to be legitimate, and which they find to be morally problematic. In a discussion, we reflect on what this says about, and means for, multispecies coexistence. Through interviews and go-along participant observation with 32 municipal hunters in Sweden, we show how municipal hunters wrestle with growing unease about new custodial roles they are expected to inhabit, as facilitators of the natural order, as garbage collectors of society for unwanted wildlife, and as enforcers of an interspecies code of conduct for the city. Based on this analysis, we discuss the relative standing of reparative, sacrificial, aesthetic, goodwill, practical, categorical and situational rationales for culling. This paints a picture of hunters as more conflicted about their control of urban nature, in challenge with the stereotypical idea of the professional hunter as a ‘natural born culler’. It also shows a city of parallel planes of multispecies coexistence, where some species and animals get a pass more than others.
{"title":"Natural born cullers? How hunters police the more-than-human right to the city","authors":"E. von Essen, David Redmalm","doi":"10.1177/25148486231221021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486231221021","url":null,"abstract":"Urban areas are a messy more-than-human interface for humans and synanthropic wildlife. Norms for what constitutes a ‘problem’ animal to be culled, a displaced animal to be rescued, or a species nuisance whom one simply has to let live, are undergoing rapid change. We investigate the changing expectations that municipal hunters experience that they have from society in relation to managing problem wildlife in cities. Adding to the literature on the constitution of ‘problem’ animals in human environments, we show what happens to these animals in the practical sense, and what informs this decision. Our point of departure is to ask by what rationales hunters consider lethal interventions in urban nature to be legitimate, and which they find to be morally problematic. In a discussion, we reflect on what this says about, and means for, multispecies coexistence. Through interviews and go-along participant observation with 32 municipal hunters in Sweden, we show how municipal hunters wrestle with growing unease about new custodial roles they are expected to inhabit, as facilitators of the natural order, as garbage collectors of society for unwanted wildlife, and as enforcers of an interspecies code of conduct for the city. Based on this analysis, we discuss the relative standing of reparative, sacrificial, aesthetic, goodwill, practical, categorical and situational rationales for culling. This paints a picture of hunters as more conflicted about their control of urban nature, in challenge with the stereotypical idea of the professional hunter as a ‘natural born culler’. It also shows a city of parallel planes of multispecies coexistence, where some species and animals get a pass more than others.","PeriodicalId":507916,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space","volume":"43 16","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139176414","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-11DOI: 10.1177/25148486231217883
Alison E. Adams, A. Saville, Thomas E. Shriver
Extant research regarding collective memory has established the importance of examining how socially constructed memories shape group identities, lived experiences, and realities over time. In addition, collective memory scholars have underscored the inextricable and co-shaping linkages between space, place, and collective memory. However, comparatively less is known about how collective memories are constructed and articulated in cases of environmental exposures. We argue that it is important to investigate the ways in which exposed communities preserve their stories and how their collective memories influence efforts to seek redress as well as push for broader social change. We examine a case of historical pesticide exposure and related illnesses and mortality among farmworkers in Central Florida. We ask how exposed communities translate their experiences into a cohesive collective memory, how cultural artifacts preserve their stories in the broader discursive context, and how they utilize various histories as a form of health activism. We draw on data including ten years of farmworker blog entries, in-depth interviews, and media coverage. Our analysis revealed how farmworkers created artifacts representative of their memories of environmental exposures and illnesses, as well as how they translated these experiences into a cohesive collective memory.
{"title":"Folk art, storytelling, and space: Collective memory and pesticide exposure","authors":"Alison E. Adams, A. Saville, Thomas E. Shriver","doi":"10.1177/25148486231217883","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486231217883","url":null,"abstract":"Extant research regarding collective memory has established the importance of examining how socially constructed memories shape group identities, lived experiences, and realities over time. In addition, collective memory scholars have underscored the inextricable and co-shaping linkages between space, place, and collective memory. However, comparatively less is known about how collective memories are constructed and articulated in cases of environmental exposures. We argue that it is important to investigate the ways in which exposed communities preserve their stories and how their collective memories influence efforts to seek redress as well as push for broader social change. We examine a case of historical pesticide exposure and related illnesses and mortality among farmworkers in Central Florida. We ask how exposed communities translate their experiences into a cohesive collective memory, how cultural artifacts preserve their stories in the broader discursive context, and how they utilize various histories as a form of health activism. We draw on data including ten years of farmworker blog entries, in-depth interviews, and media coverage. Our analysis revealed how farmworkers created artifacts representative of their memories of environmental exposures and illnesses, as well as how they translated these experiences into a cohesive collective memory.","PeriodicalId":507916,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space","volume":"46 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139183648","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-11-29DOI: 10.1177/25148486231217891
D. Johnson, Karen Fisher, Meg Parsons
Drawing on ethnographic research with Māori women in northern Aotearoa (New Zealand) I use this paper to encourage reflection on how the loss and damages (L&D) discourse might better engage with Indigenous peoples’ lived realities of climate change. I argue L&D scholarship and policy-making is dominated by reductive economic, hazard-focussed, and fatalistic framings of climate impacts and adaptation that are largely misaligned with Indigenous (and specifically Māori) approaches to loss and damage. I illustrate recurrent themes in the research using the narratives of two Māori women who employ forms of cultural resurgence to revitalise health-giving relationships with the land and offset multiple losses, damages, and harms to health and wellbeing sustained through settler colonialism, neoliberalism, and climate change. The narratives re-frame loss, damage, and adaptation from the perspective of Māori women. They provide much-needed empirical evidence of intangible, non-economic, lived, and felt L&D, their socio-political (as opposed to simply biophysical) drivers, and the actions Indigenous women employ to transform vulnerability, adapt to change, and secure intergenerational wellbeing in line with their view of the world. Together, the narratives underscore the vital importance of engaging social context when conceptualising and responding to L&D, support the move towards Indigenous-led, decolonised adaptation, and reaffirm the important role of Indigenous women in responding to climate change and leading social transformation.
{"title":"Resistance, resurgence, and wellbeing: climate change loss and damages from the perspective of Māori women","authors":"D. Johnson, Karen Fisher, Meg Parsons","doi":"10.1177/25148486231217891","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486231217891","url":null,"abstract":"Drawing on ethnographic research with Māori women in northern Aotearoa (New Zealand) I use this paper to encourage reflection on how the loss and damages (L&D) discourse might better engage with Indigenous peoples’ lived realities of climate change. I argue L&D scholarship and policy-making is dominated by reductive economic, hazard-focussed, and fatalistic framings of climate impacts and adaptation that are largely misaligned with Indigenous (and specifically Māori) approaches to loss and damage. I illustrate recurrent themes in the research using the narratives of two Māori women who employ forms of cultural resurgence to revitalise health-giving relationships with the land and offset multiple losses, damages, and harms to health and wellbeing sustained through settler colonialism, neoliberalism, and climate change. The narratives re-frame loss, damage, and adaptation from the perspective of Māori women. They provide much-needed empirical evidence of intangible, non-economic, lived, and felt L&D, their socio-political (as opposed to simply biophysical) drivers, and the actions Indigenous women employ to transform vulnerability, adapt to change, and secure intergenerational wellbeing in line with their view of the world. Together, the narratives underscore the vital importance of engaging social context when conceptualising and responding to L&D, support the move towards Indigenous-led, decolonised adaptation, and reaffirm the important role of Indigenous women in responding to climate change and leading social transformation.","PeriodicalId":507916,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space","volume":"62 14","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139209990","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-11-29DOI: 10.1177/25148486231217141
Ambarish Karamchedu
This article explores the political economy of groundwater-led agrarian transformation in dryland India through the expansion of groundwater irrigation and rice production since the 1990s. Within this process, I speak to aspirations by subsistence farmers and imaginaries by state governments for agricultural commercialisation via expanding and investing in irrigation infrastructures. In India, this has largely been driven by private and decentralised investments by smallholder farmers. Theoretically adding to the literature on water infrastructures, development aspirations and groundwater governance, I find how farmer aspirations of rice cultivation and associations of the crop with food security and status drove the debt-laden and capital-intensive rapid adoption of groundwater irrigation in dryland Telangana, aided by specific discourses and electricity subsidies policies post the formation of the newest state in India in 2014. I find that political discourses of historical inequalities over water in the struggle for state formation of Telangana in 2014 mobilised electricity subsidies as a key lever to re-imagine the state as a rice bowl of India through groundwater expansion, producing uneven political economy and ecological repercussions for farmers. This article finds that while rice production increased in a short period in Telangana, it came at the expense of widespread well failures and indebtedness at the farmer and village level colliding with the fragile semi-arid climate and hard rock aquifer setting in the state, deepening distress and decay from depleted water infrastructures and failed aspirations.
{"title":"Creating the ‘Rice Bowl of India’: Examining the political economy of groundwater-led agrarian transformation in dryland India","authors":"Ambarish Karamchedu","doi":"10.1177/25148486231217141","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486231217141","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the political economy of groundwater-led agrarian transformation in dryland India through the expansion of groundwater irrigation and rice production since the 1990s. Within this process, I speak to aspirations by subsistence farmers and imaginaries by state governments for agricultural commercialisation via expanding and investing in irrigation infrastructures. In India, this has largely been driven by private and decentralised investments by smallholder farmers. Theoretically adding to the literature on water infrastructures, development aspirations and groundwater governance, I find how farmer aspirations of rice cultivation and associations of the crop with food security and status drove the debt-laden and capital-intensive rapid adoption of groundwater irrigation in dryland Telangana, aided by specific discourses and electricity subsidies policies post the formation of the newest state in India in 2014. I find that political discourses of historical inequalities over water in the struggle for state formation of Telangana in 2014 mobilised electricity subsidies as a key lever to re-imagine the state as a rice bowl of India through groundwater expansion, producing uneven political economy and ecological repercussions for farmers. This article finds that while rice production increased in a short period in Telangana, it came at the expense of widespread well failures and indebtedness at the farmer and village level colliding with the fragile semi-arid climate and hard rock aquifer setting in the state, deepening distress and decay from depleted water infrastructures and failed aspirations.","PeriodicalId":507916,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space","volume":"150 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139213348","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-11-26DOI: 10.1177/25148486231215179
John G. Stehlin
Urban highways are widely recognized to have devastating social, economic, and environmental consequences, locking in fossil energy dependence, racial and class segregation, and suburban sprawl. Today, as much of the infrastructure built during the peak of the midcentury road construction boom in the global North reaches the end of its lifespan, there is growing interest in removing highways and replacing them with parks, housing, and surface boulevards in the interest of economic development, repairing social divisions in urban space, and fostering more sustainable mobility. Based on preliminary research, this paper offers an empirically driven conceptual outline of highway removal projects in the United States and Spain. I argue that highway removal constitutes an opportunity for a “socioecological fix” for the emerging crisis of automobility, but in practice, highway removal projects may reinscribe the scalar contradictions of carbon-intensive urban-regional metabolisms. Through several empirical cases of highway removal projects, I examine three dimensions through which these contradictions can be understood: national policy changes in urban infrastructure planning and governance, material conflicts between demolition and tunneling and their implications for regional metabolisms, and local sustainable development politics and their distributional contradictions. Although the projects sketched here tend to fall short of their transformative promises, I emphasize that highway removal remains a critical arena of urban climate change politics.
{"title":"“Freeways without futures”: Urban highway removal in the United States and Spain as socio-ecological fix?","authors":"John G. Stehlin","doi":"10.1177/25148486231215179","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486231215179","url":null,"abstract":"Urban highways are widely recognized to have devastating social, economic, and environmental consequences, locking in fossil energy dependence, racial and class segregation, and suburban sprawl. Today, as much of the infrastructure built during the peak of the midcentury road construction boom in the global North reaches the end of its lifespan, there is growing interest in removing highways and replacing them with parks, housing, and surface boulevards in the interest of economic development, repairing social divisions in urban space, and fostering more sustainable mobility. Based on preliminary research, this paper offers an empirically driven conceptual outline of highway removal projects in the United States and Spain. I argue that highway removal constitutes an opportunity for a “socioecological fix” for the emerging crisis of automobility, but in practice, highway removal projects may reinscribe the scalar contradictions of carbon-intensive urban-regional metabolisms. Through several empirical cases of highway removal projects, I examine three dimensions through which these contradictions can be understood: national policy changes in urban infrastructure planning and governance, material conflicts between demolition and tunneling and their implications for regional metabolisms, and local sustainable development politics and their distributional contradictions. Although the projects sketched here tend to fall short of their transformative promises, I emphasize that highway removal remains a critical arena of urban climate change politics.","PeriodicalId":507916,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space","volume":"33 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139235690","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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