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From the Archives

In our "From the Archives" Series, we link archived blog material to current themed collections.

Rising from the Ashes: Rural Communities in Portugal’s Fiery Landscapes

Filipa Soares, Luísa Schmidt, & Ana Delicado. Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Universidade Nova de Lisboa.

On June 17th, 2017, Ferraria de São João (hereafter Ferraria), a small-sized village in central Portugal remotely located at the top of a hill, was encircled by flames. The two available fire engines, one at each end of the village, were unable to refill with water at some point. There were no helicopters either. The… more...

Cascade Learning for Environmental Justice

Prerna Srigyan, University of California-Irvine

Environmental Justice as a Pedagogical Problem Consider the Park Avenue Elementary School in Cudahy, located ten miles from downtown Los Angeles. Or shift your attention to the Rani Jhansi Sarvodaya Kanya Vidyalaya in east Delhi, a few miles away from the Indian capital city’s most affluent neighborhoods. Though continents apart, what ties these two schools… more...

Marshall Urban Firestorm: On the Paradox of Greening America's Suburbia

Stephanie Loveless, Humboldt University, Jevgeniy Bluwstein, University of Fribourg

The Fire On December 30th, 2021, the Marshall Fire broke out in suburban communities south-east of the idyllic city of Boulder, Colorado, located at the foot of the Rocky Mountains in the United States. Within hours, the fire burned roughly 1,000 homes down to their foundations. It was deemed an “urban fire storm” by climate… more...

Sensing Cumulative Toxicities

Anita Hardon, Wageningen University, Tait Mandler, University of Amsterdam

In our everyday lives we encounter and are exposed to a dizzying array of chemicals – through the air we breathe, water we drink, food we eat, products we buy, work we do, and environments we move through. A recent review of the scientific literature estimates that the accelerating mass-production of chemicals has led to… more...

Themed Collection: Toxicity

This series of posts will accompany the 2021 special issue of Environment and Society on “Toxicity.”

“Images abound of plastic bags riding the currents of the Pacific Ocean and collecting in the Mariana Trench; stockpiles of nuclear waste pumped deep into earth’s outer crust; smoke and smog (a fusion of particulate matter and ozone) settling in above sprawling urban colonies, slowly killing its denizens; spent oxygen containers pockmarking the snows of Everest; and billions of pieces of space debris endlessly falling in Low Earth Orbit, just beyond a thin and rapidly changing breathable atmosphere. So goes the narrative of the Anthropocene, a purportedly new geological epoch demarcated by the planetary effects of human activity…” Call for Papers for the Environment and Society Special Issue on Toxicity (Jerry Jacka & Amelia Moore).

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Themed Collection: Oceans

This series of posts builds upon and expand the issues raised in the 2020 special issue of Environment and Society on “Oceans.” Featuring new content as well as additional perspectives from the authors of the special issue.

“For many, the ocean is the epicenter of evolution as well as the ultimate bellwether for the continued vitality of living systems. It is vast, deep, and mysterious, and simultaneously familiar, intimate, and personal… It is also the site of scientific exploration, geopolitical territorialization, Romantic imagination, capitalist extraction, and shifting everyday relations of love, death, and livelihood… The ocean is both an epic backdrop and an active agent in human activities, at times teeming with living beings and at times emptied of all agency. It is at once dangerous and endangered.” Introduction to the Environment and Society Special Issue on Oceans (Jerry Jacka & Amelia Moore).

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