Browsing by Subject "environmental humanities"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Atrazine: a lively chemical journey
    (2023) Dornbrack, Kevin; Twidle, Hedley; Petrik, Leslie
    Atrazine is a widely used pesticide, particularly popular in corn plantations for its herbicidal properties of killing and preventing the growth of certain weeds and grasses. Evidence of its neurotoxicity, hormone disruption and reproductive toxicity led the EU to ban the chemical in 2003. Despite long standing evidence of its harm, South Africa continues to use atrazine, the majority of which is imported from the EU. Drawing on South Africa as a case study, I illustrate Atrazine's unique journey through South Africa's political economic landscape, interpreted in relation to those of the USA and EU, highlighting that problems of chemical pollution are political as much as they are molecular. In this project, I have employed biochemical, epidemiological, historical, social and political scientific approaches to form an interdisciplinary understanding of atrazine's biochemical, ecological, and economic effects; how its harm lands unevenly on poor and marginalized people, often in the global south; and how commercial and governmental structures enable and maintain its use. This interdisciplinary understanding of atrazine's uneven effects as well as its varied socio-political figurations illustrates how and why regulatory processes have proved vastly inadequate to curtail the chemical pollution caused by atrazine and many other pesticides. The results of this research should hopefully serve as a case study and cautionary tale of globally increasing and unevenly experienced chemical exposure. This project argues that effects of atrazine within their political and historic contexts should be considered a form of unspectacular violence, that slowly but persistently degrades quality of life. By tracing the networks of atrazine's chemical relations, this project illustrates that the molecular is always political.
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    Ebbs and flows: more-than-human encounters with the Cape Flats Aquifer in a context of climate change
    (2021) Polic, Deanna; Solomon, Nikiwe; Green, Lesley
    This dissertation advocates inclusive and integrated more-than-human relations as humans, technoscience, and nature become increasingly entangled in contexts of climate change and socio-ecological crisis. Researching in the environmental humanities between 2017 and 2020, I situate my study in Cape Town, South Africa, where the fluctuations between water's abundance and absence—as evidenced by the 2018 drought—have necessitated new approaches to ontology and epistemology that critically disrupt dominant systems of thought. Using the Cape Flats Aquifer and its aboveground area, the Philippi Horticultural Area, as my primary field sites, I focused on the legal battle that has surfaced between various human actors over land and water use, to explore how different human-nature relationships emerge, and to evaluate the social and environmental implications thereof. The overall inquiry guiding my research is how the Cape Flats Aquifer can make the case for multispecies relations by examining how it flows, or is brought into, existence. First, I present the different kinds of evidence that make the aquifer and its aboveground area un/seen; second, I assess whether alternative ways of evidencing the aquifer exist with a focus on farming practices in the Philippi Horticultural Area; third, I question what ought to be part of the aquifer evidentiary if sustainable, adaptive, and resilient human-nature relations are to be achieved? I argue that humans, multispecies, and earthly bodies such as the aquifer ought to be understood as relational, multiple, and intimately implicated in each other in the face of unpredictable climatic conditions.
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    Rivers that become reservoirs: an ethnography of water commodification in Lesotho
    (2022) Sello, Kefiloe; Green, Lesley
    Through exploring the relationship of people to water and how that relationship changes when water becomes a commodity, this study addresses the devaluation of the relationship of people and water in the environment they live in and contrasts the devaluation with the value attributed to commodified water by neoliberal economic policy. Where the relationships between people and water are financialised, commodification sets people and water apart in planning and policies as if they are separate entities. Focusing on the effects of the Lesotho Highlands Water Project in the commodification of water in Lesotho, this study contrasts life lived with freeflowing water and with commodified water. Through ethnographic data collected over 18 months in three villages around the Katse Dam and the Mohale Dam, the dissertation demonstrates that development agencies do not take into consideration the human-nonhuman relationship that exist between communities and their environment. The study demonstrates that economic development through the damming of rivers has rendered people both ecologically and economically precarious. Drawing from these findings, the study proposes that development based on the extraction of natural resources and the assumption that people and environment are separate, should be replaced with an integrated theory of habitability and wellbeing that includes, in its social theory, the relationships of people with soil and water. The thesis was guided by multispecies, political ecology and economic anthropology theories.
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    Texturing absence: a geography of the disappeared Woodstock Beach
    (2023) Anderson, Molly; Daya, Shari
    Up until the late 1960s, the Cape Town suburb of Woodstock had a beach. Decades of land reclamation – begun as early as 1890 – culminated in the beach being entirely subsumed by railways, roads, and harbor infrastructure. Woodstock's beachside heritage is largely unknown, as are the processes by which it disappeared, meaning that its role as a site of shipwrecks, a source of food, and a place of leisure has long gone unexplored and unacknowledged. What does the presence, and then absence, of Woodstock Beach mean for people and place in Cape Town? Understanding the role of Woodstock Beach in the making of the city requires a methodological approach that is attuned to both presence and absence. The method of ‘texture' draws on creative and critical approaches to trace the beach through material inscriptions, memories, metaphors, archives and histories. Texture offers an extended rigor by engaging ambiguities, absences, glimpses, and incoherent strands as generative moments that allow more traces to be followed. This critical and creative orientation is engaged in the analysis and the writing of these stories. Attending to Woodstock Beach in this way reveals a series of small-scale and intimate stories about everyday people and things, which layer and juxtapose with stories of slavery, dispossession, colonialism, capitalism, and apartheid. The stories of Woodstock Beach – its presence and its disappearance – illuminate continuities and connections across place, time, and scale which highlight the nuanced, complicated, and always ongoing ways in which place and its politics are made and re-made both in Cape Town, and at a countrywide scale.
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    The Kuils River multiple: versions of an urban river on the edge of Cape Town, South Africa
    (2022) Solomon, Nikiwe; Green, Lesley
    This thesis explores how diverse ways of knowing and being with the Kuils River, located in Cape Town, South Africa, are shaped and in turn shape the river. The management of water (in pipes and rivers) and the development of water infrastructure are deeply rooted in societal development agendas that, over time, have been embedded in discourses of empire, economic growth, state formation, sustainability and technological efficiency. When river management is informed by different agendas, the practice of management then differs across different levels of governance, research and communities, and multiple meanings of different forms of human-water relationships emerge. This study examines how the resulting tangle of meanings impacts river management practices in Cape Town, and in turn shape the well-being of people and more-than-human communities living in and with the river. Specific research questions include: What are the diverse ways of knowing and relating to the Kuils River? How are these diverse ways of knowing and relating enacted? How does this shape river and capital flows, governance and the well-being of multispecies communities? Based on roughly three years of transdisciplinary methods of ethnographic fieldwork, archival research and water testing in the Kuils River catchment area, this thesis explores how lives, politics, technology and environment are impacted by river management practices in Cape Town and how these produce different versions of the river, which in turn shape the everyday of the Kuils and how it is managed. In focusing on the multiple interactions with the Kuils River and its associated water bodies and on the flow of the river itself at community and governance levels, this thesis foregrounds differing meanings of ‘environment' and their management and how these versions limit the achievement of urban and peri-urban wellbeing. This thesis highlights the divergent experiences of the managed Kuils River (including those of people and of the water body) to demonstrate that particular logics have geological effects that will be experienced far into the future.