Amelia Fiske a.fiske@tum.de Institute for History and Ethics in Medicine, Technical University of Munich It is mid-June 2012, and I have travelled from the Amazon to the southern highlands of Ecuador, to see Pablo Cardoso’s exposition of Lago Agrio-Sour Lake in the artist’s home city of Cuenca.[i] Lago Agrio-Sour Lake merges art and activism to … Continue reading Lago Agrio – Sour Lake: Environmental justice through art
Tom Ogwang, Department of Cultural Geography, Faculty of Spatial Sciences, University of Groningen, The Netherlands. Contact details: t.ogwang@rug.nl, or ogwangtom@gmail.com Introduction Following the discovery of oil in 2006, production licences were issued to the Joint Venture Partners, CNOOC (2014), Total E&P Uganda (2017), and Tullow Uganda Operations (2017). The licences will run for 25 years, … Continue reading Social impacts of oil developments in Uganda: The past, present and future scenarios
Alice Mah, Professor of Sociology, University of Warwick I have been researching the petrochemical industry for more than five years now. Day in and out, this behemoth industry, with its toxicity, controversies, and sprawling network of activities around the globe, has been looming in the back of my mind. Whenever I am gripped by an … Continue reading Special Issue: Making the Petrochemical Connection
Dr Thom Davies, University of Nottingham, @ThomDavies Prelude: Some of the ideas discussed in this Toxic News piece are explored further in two recent academic publications, available here and here (Open Access). In September 2017, I returned to Louisiana to continue ethnographic research about lived experiences in a region infamously nicknamed ‘Cancer Alley’ – home to the … Continue reading Toxic Geographies: chemical plants, plantations, and plants that will not grow
Dr David Brown, Research Assistant, University of Warwick The disproportionate impacts of toxic pollution have been well documented in environmental justice research, with marginalised, low-income and minority communities tending to bear the greatest burdens of industrial pollution. Environmental justice researchers have contributed significant insights into the myriad forms of injustice associated with the uneven benefits … Continue reading Editorial: Environmental justice and the embodied, lived experiences of toxic pollution
Troy D. Abel (Huxley College of the Environment on the Peninsulas, Western Washington University) Jonah White (Department of Geography, Michigan State University) Stacy Clauson (Department of Environmental Studies, Western Washington University) Emilio’s voice cracked in response to our air pollution experience question. He’s one of Seattle’s thousands of soccer dads. Emilio recounted smelling and tasting … Continue reading Seattle’s Segregated Riskscape
Sarah Marie Wiebe (University of Hawai’i, Mānoa) Jen Bagelman (University of Exeter, United Kingdom) Laurence Butet-Roch (Ryerson University) I didn’t Know! Poem by Ada Lockridge Aamjiwnaang First Nation I didn’t Know that we had a say on what goes on in the plants I didn’t Know what was being released or how much or the … Continue reading Bodies Exposed: Reframing the Geopolitics of Dilution in Canada’s Chemical Valley
Angelo Raffaele Ippolito (United Nations University – International Institute for Global Health) Bruno Andreas Walther (National Sun Yat-Sen University) Between 2017 and 2018, I carried out ethnographic fieldwork in the Southern Italian city of Taranto. Being from the city myself, I was aware of the ongoing struggle between a small group of active citizens and … Continue reading Contaminated Morals: the Struggle of Industrial Pollution in a Southern Italian City
Loretta Lou, Department of Sociology, University of Warwick Decades of unrestrained development has led to some serious environmental problems in China and Taiwan today. While sustainable development and effective enforcement of pollution control remain a challenging task for both governments, we begin to see a variety of creative responses from the bottom-up. In this Toxic … Continue reading Editorial: Living with Toxicity in Greater China: Realities and Reactions
Thomas Verbeek and Calvin Jephcote, Department of Sociology, University of Warwick Air pollution is increasingly seen as a major public health issue, with new research outputs covered by international organisations and the national media every few weeks. The World Health Organisation (WHO) states that “clean air is a basic requirement of human health and well-being”. … Continue reading Editorial: Measuring and monitoring in complex times – the case of air pollution
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