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 …

Special Issue: “The Making of Caribbean Not-so-Natural Disasters”

Social inequality, colonialism and the commodification of disaster-related recovery are central to explaining the not-so-natural disasters caused by the 2017 Caribbean hurricane season, a recent special issue by Alternautas blog shows. Alternautas , a peer-reviewed blog dedicated to critical explorations of development and the civilizational crisis has recently published a special issue titled "The Making of Caribbean Not-so-Natural …

Hurricane Matthew is just the latest unnatural disaster to strike Haiti

By Jason von Meding and Giuseppe Forino* In the wake of hurricane Matthew, destruction and suffering in Haiti has returned to the headlines. If we don't acknowledge that the roots of risk and vulnerability lie in colonial history and structural injustice we will see this happening again and again. At least 1,000 people were killed …

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 …