In episode 55 of Nature’s Past, a podcast on Canadian environmental history, SEan Kheraj speaks to Jessica van Horssen about her new book, A Town Called Asbestos.
Through a case study of the nickel mine Ambatovy in Madagascar, the authors explore local perceptions of the magnitude and distribution of impacts of biodiversity offset projects on local well-being.
This essay explores the paradoxical relationship between extractive activities of the mining company Anaconda and indigenous villages of Atacama, Chile.
Alok Amatya studies the depiction of indigenous struggles against the grab of minerals, crude oil, and other natural resources by private and government corporations in works such as Arundhati Roy’s travel essay Walking with the Comrades (2010). He suggests that narratives of conflict over the extraction of natural resources can be studied as the corpus of “resource conflict literature,” thus generating a global comparative framework for the study of contemporary indigenous struggles.
Triangulating narratives from a prospective mining site in northern Norway, Hugo Reinert works to identify (and render graspable) a particular effect of retroactive shock—tracing its resonance through experiences of chemical exposure, colonial racism, cultural erasure, and destruction of the built environment.
In this article, Sasha Litvintseva examines the history and materiality of asbestos to theorize toxic embodiment through the mutuality of the haptic sense and the breaching of boundaries of inside and outside. She develops this through an analysis of her own film project Asbestos (2016), shot at the mining town of Asbestos, Quebec.
This article explores the social and ecological legacies of the peat industry in Russia and the different meanings that people attach to peatlands after the end of peat extraction.
Shortis suggests that the World Park Antarctica campaign offers a positive example of an environmental campaign that includes but does not center scientific authority.
This collection of studies provides valuable historical contexts for making sense of contemporary environmental challenges facing Latin America.
This article rethinks the environmental history of water and power in Copiapó between 1744 and 1801.
