UnderCurrents: Journal of Critical Environmental Studies (E-Journal - York University)
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Mapping the Furnace Room
Full text linkWhen he was a child he had a passion for mapping the house, the earth: archaeology, destratifying and stratifying. Imagining maps in his cobbled mind. He walked around the block with a question in his mind that had been bottled in the furnace of the house. A question like “who am I, here?” and upon arriving at the same point on the block, the same question would blaze up. An inflammatory question forged in the furnace of his house when he went to fill a pitcher with distilled water and clambered over a mountain of photo albums to arrive at the distiller
Global Wildings
Full text linkMilitaries are amongst the biggest global environmental players. Militaries are major environmental abusers. All militaries, everywhere, wreak environmental havoc — sometimes by accident, sometimes as “collateral damage,” and often as predetermined strategy. Anywhere in the world, a military presence is virtually the singlemost reliable predictor of environmental damage: wherever there is a military presence (whether a base, a war zone, a storage facility, or a testing facility), one will almost inevitably find environmental damage. From Subic Bay to Goose Bay, from the mountains of Afghanistan to the deserts of Kuwait, from Gagetown New Brunswick, to the South Pacific atoll of Kwajelein, the evidence of a largely unfettered environmental “wilding” by the world’s militaries is overwhelming and inescapable. If every military-blighted site around the world were marked on a map with red tack-pins, the earth would look as though it had measles
the lies project, 2004-2005
Full text linkThis first work in the series is grounded by the idea that our world is made up of lies of all shapes, sizes, and persuasions, and that in fact these constructs bind our universe together. I began by collecting hundreds of donated lies at lying booths set up around Montreal. I then embroidered these in white stitch on white silk, in a font designed from handwriting. My interest in using the stitch was to weave the ephemeral quality of the lies, both materially and metaphorically, and to give the lies a life and immediacy through texture and image. I then treated the embroideries chemically, dissolving the silk fabric — their support — leaving behind only the stitch. The embroideries were then pinned, in single file, a string of lies just off the walls of a gallery
Editorial Essay
Full text linkThe word nomad, etymologically from the Greek word for pasture, evokes images of a pastoral landscape, a culture that relocates periodically, and suggests also that people's movement might occur in accordance with "rhythms of the landscape." Nomadic cultures, particularly those which survive today in the face of increasing cultural homogeneity, have long held a fascination for more settled cultures. NOMAD is not however, an anthropological investigation of differing nomadic cultures and their representation. Rather, the use of nomad as a theme for this issue provides the opportunity to conceive of the idea of nomad more broadly through themes of travel, movement, memory, displacement, imposition of boundaries and ideas about home, Diaspora and belonging. The nomad is at once the versatile intellectual, the wandering revolutionary, the environmental studies student, the cyber junky, the canoe tripper, and so on. 
