Category: Pollution

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‘El aire está malo’: Living with toxics in a Chilean sacrifice zone

Efren Legaspi, Citizen of Horcón (V Region of Valparaíso, Chile)/Universidad de Sevilla. efrenlb@gmail.com ‘El aire está malo’ (‘the air feels bad´) is a common expression among people from the Quintero-Puchuncaví bay (V Region of Valparaíso, Chile), who must deal with the atmospheric emissions generated by the industrial complex Ventanas on a daily basis. In the … Continue reading ‘El aire está malo’: Living with toxics in a Chilean sacrifice zone

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Living and resisting with agrotoxics in their blood: Struggles for health and environmental rights against sprayings and agrobiofuels pollution in the heart of the Argentinian agribusiness

Mauricio Berger, PhD, Social Sciences, Associate Researcher, Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET), Associate Professor Instituto de Investigación y Formación en Administración Pública, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina (IIFAP, FCS, UNC). mauricio.berger@unc.edu.ar Cecilia Carrizo, Msc, Public Administration, Associate Professor, Instituto de Investigación y Formación en Administración Pública, Facultad de … Continue reading Living and resisting with agrotoxics in their blood: Struggles for health and environmental rights against sprayings and agrobiofuels pollution in the heart of the Argentinian agribusiness

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Living with lead in Uruguay

Daniel Renfrew- Department of Sociology and Anthropology, West Virginia University daniel.renfrew@mail.wvu.edu Lead poisoning, the disease of antiquity and the twentieth century’s “mother of all industrial poisons” (Markowitz and Rosner, 2002), continues to haunt and cover the earth. Lead is a legacy pollutant of America’s toxic infrastructure, found in the cracked and peeling paints of old … Continue reading Living with lead in Uruguay

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Mine tailings and enviromental (dis)controls in a Brazilian coastal area

Eliana S. J. Creado – Federal University of Espírito Santo, Brazil[1] eliana.creado@gmail.com When we started to study the possibilities of sociotechnological disasters (see Zhouri et al., 2017) in a fishery village, called Regência Augusta, at Espírito Santo State, Brasil, where Doce River meets the Atlantic Ocean, we were thinking about something related to oil or … Continue reading Mine tailings and enviromental (dis)controls in a Brazilian coastal area

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Making Mercury History: Toxic Assets and Neocolonial Extraction

Ruth Goldstein- Department of Global and International Studies, University of California, Irvine. ruth.goldstein@uci.edu (See below for Spanish translation) “In the neocolonial alchemy, gold changes into scrap metal and food into poison.” Exiled Uruguayan scholar Eduardo Galeano writes about toxic neocolonial alchemies in the first pages of The Open Veins of Latin America (Las Venas Abiertas … Continue reading Making Mercury History: Toxic Assets and Neocolonial Extraction

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Beyond Containment: Toxic Justice and Space-Time Violence in the Ruhr

Laurie Parsons, Royal Holloway, University of London Toxic fashion is having a moment. Or rather, with modish transience, it had one. 2018 saw a huge spike in interest in the social and environmental cost of seasonally disposable clothing. From the dyes used in manufacturing them, to the burning of garment offcuts by brick workers in … Continue reading Beyond Containment: Toxic Justice and Space-Time Violence in the Ruhr

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Santa Cruz Verde 2030: A new dawn for Tenerife?

Chris Waite, University of Warwick When Alexander von Humboldt reached the peak of El Teide in June 1799, he described how the ‘prodigious transparency of the atmosphere’ contributed to ‘the magical effect’ of Tenerife’s landscape1. Humboldt was on route to what would become an extraordinary Latin American expedition that saw him scale higher peaks than … Continue reading Santa Cruz Verde 2030: A new dawn for Tenerife?

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‘Village Besieged’: An Elegy for Victims and Protest Against Taiwan’s Petrochemical Pollution

Loretta Lou, University of Macau / London School of Economics Even though it is becoming more and more common for musicians to take on the issue of environmental degradation in the age of Anthropocene, to produce an album about a particular kind of toxic pollution is literally unheard-of until Taiwanese indie rock band Sheng-Xiang & … Continue reading ‘Village Besieged’: An Elegy for Victims and Protest Against Taiwan’s Petrochemical Pollution