Between drought and monsoon: the embodied hardship of seasonal work in Maharashtra’s sugar cane plantations

by Irene Leonardelli At the end of a too-long, extremely dry summer, rural women from the drought-prone district of Beed, Maharashtra, finally return home, after six months of seasonal employment in sugar cane plantations. Encountering them allows me to reflect on experiences of drought and monsoon and on the embodied implications of environmental and agrarian …

Pupils at the forefront: the school-work interchange on climate change between university and high school in Naples

by Maria Federica Palestino, Simona Quagliano and Elena Vetromile In the wake of the Fridays for Future movement, students are taking the lead in stirring change towards climate change adaptation & mitigation. This is a short account of a project in Naples that put students' aspirations, questions and demands at center stage.  On June 5th, …

A case for small climate stories

by Dylan M. Harris The best stories about climate change are not about climate change. Rather, they are about small, particular, mundane events. They are personal and intimate. And they are grounded in specific locales. These 'small' stories show different ways of imagining, creating, and sustaining meaning in the face of climate change. As the …

Political ecologies of urban nature in Bogotá, Colombia

by Germán A. Quimbayo Ruiz In Bogotá, urban nature suffers from pressures for urban development, profit-making and corruption. But it has also been mobilised as a legitime vehicle in pursuit of a more just city-region. Bogotá is facing several environmental challenges, from air pollution and public transport to continuous pushes for profit-driven urban development, contested …

Who is guarding whom?

By Mihnea Tanasescu Does good environmentalism mean humans have to become guardians of nature? Triggered by her research in New Zealand, Mihnea Tanasescu reflects on this idea, which is so widespread as to go unnoticed. If you happen to visit the Wanganui  river or Te Urewera, the ancestral Tūhoe homeland in Aotearoa New Zealand’s North Island, you …

Local Science Fiction: Call for submissions for futuristic imaginaries

Our friends at Uneven Earth are calling for contributions in their Not afraid of the ruins series. We are happy to invite our readers to consider sharing their stories for imagining what the near and far futures in specific places may look like.   Utopian dreamers, other-worldly explorers, and psychonautic adventurers; scholars, activists, students, and critics: …

3 Years of Impunity – Letter to the world by a victim of the crime of Mariana, Brazil

by Giuseppe Orlandini and Mirella Lino This is a "Letter to the world" by Mirella Lino, a resident of Mariana, written three years after the Bento Rodrigues dam disaster, when an iron ore tailings dam suffered a catastrophic failure, flooding a vast area of Brazil with toxic mud. Her words convey the consequences on personal and …

Two tales of terrorism from the Tía María conflict, Peru

By Alexander Dunlap. The Peruvian state is laying military siege to enforce extraction operations; ironically, land defenders are the ones branded as terrorists.

Trashopolis! Storytelling, waste research and glocal conflicts

by Salvatore De Rosa This is a very personal account of an ethnographic immersion in the epicenter of an environmental conflict of huge proportions. That happens to be, at the same time, the place where I was born. It is an attempt at connecting the dots between individual existence, collective destinies and glocal ecological transformations. …

Pará, bloody Pará

Even when the police doesn’t kill in Pará, Brazil, it still lets others do the killing. The coup and the political power of the rural sector in Brasília have provided Amazonian gunmen with a carte blanche. We are living in times of death. The massacre of nine men and one woman in Pau D'Arco, on …