Abstract: There is increasing evidence to suggest that arctic cultures and ecosystems have followed non-linear responses to climate change. Norse Scandinavian farmers introduced agriculture to sub-arctic Greenland in the late tenth century, creating synanthropic landscapes and utilising seasonally abundant marine and terrestrial resources. Using a niche-construction framework and data from recent survey work, studies of diet, […]

Description: At last a history that explains how indigenous dispossession and survival underlay and shaped the birth of Australian democracy. The legacy of seizing a continent and alternately destroying and governing its original people shaped how white Australians came to see themselves as independent citizens. It also shows how shifting wider imperial and colonial politics influenced […]

Abstract: ‘Political reconciliation’ refers to processes for establishing right relations between groups that are emerging from a history coloured by violent relations. However, dominant Western, euro-descendent philosophies of political reconciliation rarely focus on ecological forms of harm or consider practices of ecological violence as constitutive of the violent relations that reconciliation hopes to repair. This article […]

Abstract: Scientists who study Dead Sea sinkholes come to know them in particular ways (as generalized hydrogeoloic phenomena, symptoms of a regional environmental crisis, or divine retribution) and at particular scales (from the distant orbit of Earth observation satellites, from digitally altered aerial photographs, and occasionally from the inside). Using ethnographic data gathered between 2012 and […]

Abstract: States increasingly rely on ambient environmental monitoring systems to provide information on environmental conditions in order to make science-based decisions on resource management. This kind of monitoring relies on a network of state and intergovernmental agencies to generate indexes, thresholds, and indicators to assess the status of air, water, and biodiversity. As a result, these […]

Abstract: Although rarely included in environmental sociology, settler colonialism significantly structures eco-social relations within the United States. This work considers the range of environmental practices and epistemologies influenced by settler colonial impositions in law, culture and discourse. In this dissertation I also introduce the term colonial ecological violence as a framework for considering the outcomes of […]

Abstract: While political ecologists have analysed the role of private property in creating and sustaining ecological inequalities, this approach does not often take property as a foundational element of racial capitalism. I argue that the defence of private property in contestation of North American oil pipelines demonstrates the centrality of property not only to the structural […]

Abstract: The purpose of my study is to explore the early history of the Colwood Golf and Country Club as a way of understanding one aspect of settler colonialism – that is to study how certain tracts of Indigenous land were transformed into a rigidly controlled space where the natural environment was manipulated to exclude certain […]

Abstract: The discourse of murdered and missing Indigenous women (MMIW) from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside is shaped by ugliness. From the frequent invocation of the colonial stereotype of the licentious and sexually deviant “Indian squaw” to the fetishization of the violence committed against these women, ugliness shapes all aspects of the mediation of Indigenous women’s disappearances. Settler […]

Abstract: This chapter reflects on the production of Orlando, Florida and how the prevailing vision of its downtown development reiterates the enduring legacy of settler colonialism through its anti-homeless policies. These policies manifest as ugly laws, laws designed to define the unsightly and unwanted bodies of the citizenry in order to keep them from view. These […]