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 …

The Flint Water Crisis: quests for justice and mechanisms of suppression

By Jevgeniy Bluwstein and Rebecca Rutt* The Flint Water Crisis led to different forms of grassroots activism demanding political accountability, transparency and redress. Yet residents’ experiences, and their needs and demands in response to the crisis, were and continue to be suppressed in multiple ways. Since 2014, the city of Flint, Michigan, has been at …

The Discourses of Environmental Disaster

By Michael J. Shapiro* Bhopal [...] occasionally returns. Other cases of 'environmental disasters', other victims are still waiting for compensation. Precarity and political responsibility is yet not taken seriously outside commercial and geopolitical cartography. Decades ago I was struck by the discursive space allocated in a report in the December 17th, 1984 issue of Time Magazine on …