Glacial Deaths, Geologic Extinction

In 2019, several funerals were held for glaciers. If enough glaciers die, could they go extinct? Is there geologic extinction? Yes. This article develops three arguments to support this claim. The first revisits Georges Cuvier’s original argument for extinction and its reliance on geology, especially glaciers. Retracing connections to glaciers and the narrowing of extinction to biological species in the nineteenth century, I argue that anthropogenic forcing on how the Earth system functions-the Anthropocene-provides warrant to rethink extinction geologically. The second argument examines the specificity of ice loss and multiple practices responding to this loss: from art exhibits at United Nations climate change meetings to anti-colonial claims for the right to be cold. The third argument consolidates a theme built across the article regarding how Isabelle Stengers’s notion of ecologies of practices provides an approach to geologic extinction that recognizes both relational and non-relational loss

Dispossession by municipalization: property, pipelines, and divisions of power in settler colonial Canada

In Canada, Indigenous activists and scholars critique municipalization as a threefold process that subverts Indigenous authority to the state, then delegates forms of state authority to Indigenous peoples, and concludes by asserting that delegated authority satisfies the terms of Indigenous self-determination. This article centers municipalization in two steps that connect it to how Canada divides power regarding foreign and domestic affairs. The first examines the history of municipalization and its evolution alongside changes in Canadian federalism. The second examines dispossession by municipalization to show how state divisions of power facilitate extraction of value from land. It uses a case where the federal government considered creating new, privatized reserves of Indigenous land explicitly to facilitate oil pipelines. Together, these support an argument that municipalization is not only a powerful language of critique, but critical to understanding the on-going production of settler colonial space

Ethical Enigmas in Modern Water Policy: The Albertan Example

This thesis examines the policy claim that Alberta’s Water for Life strategy creates the possibility of a new water ethic in that province. The key problem for this dissertation is developing and defending a framework that would allow the Alberta case to be examined against like cases. In this context, the framework developed engages topics of: (1) territory and the state, (2) the effects of classification systems on policy claims regarding water abundance, water scarcity and water security, and (3) the normative role of decision-making structures on water management and planning. In this sense, the framework developed provides for the possibility of examining the water ethics of places comparable to Alberta. In short: a framework to analyze the water ethic(s) of state jurisdictions. As the water ethics framework is developed, the dissertation draws on archival research, a modified content analysis of Albertan policy documents and semi-structured interviews (n=25) with governance practitioners. The key contribution of this dissertation is the water ethics framework and its utility in explaining how changes in modern water policy affect governance norms. In particular, the framework offers the opportunity to interpret the water ethics of state jurisdictions in co-evolutionary terms, which allows the spatial and temporal changes wrought within modernity to be seen for their reciprocal effects. That is, the framework allows for the examination of how the new water ethic in Alberta’s Water for Life strategy defends and departs from the existing one

Pop-up infrastructure: Water ATMs and new delivery networks in India

Over the last decade, thousands of water ATMs have been installed across the Global South. In India, these vending machines increasingly augment both formal and informal networks of water supply and delivery. This article examines media reports on water ATMs in India in order to survey some of the variance across different water ATM technologies with respect to cost, capacity, and fit with infrastructure networks. It then examines how water ATMs are socially and politically positioned with respect to existing, promised, and incomplete infrastructure projects where they are installed: slums, hospitals, commuting routes, railway stations, rural villages, religious sites, and in 'smart city' initiatives. The analysis considers how water ATMs frustrate the distinctions between formal and informal infrastructure that are often used to describe differences in water networks. The article develops a novel approach to water ATMs as 'pop-up infrastructure' in which the movement of matter is operationally independent from, and only contingently reliant on, existing water delivery networks. Despite their unique aspects, water ATMs produce new common borders among social, material, and political relations to water. These relations are often contested and suggest important areas for future research on water ATMs

Water as Global Social Policy—International Organizations, Resource Scarcity, and Environmental Security

Water is an important area of global social policy. This chapter provides historical context for understanding how international organizations developed a distinctly global orientation to water policy alongside the emergence of global hydrology in the mid-twentieth century. Subsequently, international organizations linked concerns over water scarcity to integrated approaches to resource management. As human impacts on the global water system accelerated into the twenty-first century, international organizations influenced the shift from concerns over resource scarcity to those over environmental security. Water security is now central to how international organizations frame and respond to risks affecting interconnected environmental and economic systems

Multispecies thought from the shadows: the associated worlds of dog-walking

This paper develops the concept of multispecies thought through a study of dog-walking in a public park in Lancaster, England. It draws on cybernetic ideas from Bateson, Peircean semiotics and von Uexküll’s umwelten to explore how multispecies worlds come into being in the spaces of the park, and amongst humans, dogs, leads, toys and other things. It focuses on how an understanding of multispecies thought can be discerned that is not only specific to the situated relations in dog-walks, but also constituted through routines that foster new capacities between specific bodies. In this way, we come to understand multispecies worlds as located at the sites where specific, associated worlds are co-produced by dogs and humans yet reducible to neither. We use the examples of lead-walking and play with balls and frisbees to show how semiotic relations are co-produced across species. Building on previous work, we confront species-defined notions of capacity and thought and look instead at how the indexical relations of multispecies thinking offers liberatory potential

From integration to intersectionality: A review of water ethics

The field of water ethics focuses on the judgments affecting water use and decision making, as well as their normative justification. These justifications can take many forms. Consequently, water ethics grapple with philosophical considerations, law, custom, religion, and the practical options available for accessing or distributing water in different contexts. Increasingly, the field also includes active academic support for communities seeking water justice. This review examines these dynamics in three steps. The first section provides a brief history of water ethics as a distinct field of inquiry. It highlights how philosophical approaches to water ethics have been in tension with the use of water ethics to support integrated water resources management. The second section reviews scholarship from multiple disciplines that overlap in their concern regarding ethical relations to water and different ways social norms are justified. This scholarship has pushed the field of water ethics to reflect more critically on what constitutes justification given the diversity and plurality of water norms. The third section examines how the obligations entailed by water ethics are acted upon by scholarly and community initiatives seeking water justice. Here, the article focuses on how the recognition of multiple vectors of inequality has led to a shift towards intersectional ethics. A short conclusion offers no prescriptions but rather encouragement for continued appreciation of how this subfield helps reframe and address urgent water concerns