This series of posts will accompany the 2021 special issue of Environment and Society on “Toxicity.”
“Images abound of plastic bags riding the currents of the Pacific Ocean and collecting in the Mariana Trench; stockpiles of nuclear waste pumped deep into earth’s outer crust; smoke and smog (a fusion of particulate matter and ozone) settling in above sprawling urban colonies, slowly killing its denizens; spent oxygen containers pockmarking the snows of Everest; and billions of pieces of space debris endlessly falling in Low Earth Orbit, just beyond a thin and rapidly changing breathable atmosphere. So goes the narrative of the Anthropocene, a purportedly new geological epoch demarcated by the planetary effects of human activity…” Call for Papers for the Environment and Society Special Issue on Toxicity (Jerry Jacka & Amelia Moore).