UnderCurrents: Journal of Critical Environmental Studies (E-Journal - York University)
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Biology as Religion: Genetic Code as Bible, Scientist as Priest, and Genetic Counselling the Confessional
No full textI recently attended a lecture at Acadia University given by a biologist from McGill University who had been sitting on the Canadian panel looking into reproductive technologies. During the lecture, he continually downplayed the risks associated with reproductive technologies and dismissed all critics of the new technology as bio-luddites. It was his belief that many Canadians were afraid of biotechnology because they had not been properly trained in the field. He repeatedly stated the need for early education in genetics for the Canadian population so that they would be better prepared to make decisions around the emerging biotechnologies. He called for "basic genetic principles" to be taught to children in grade four, ensuring that they would grow up with realistic notions of what the technology could accomplish.
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Inside the Hall of Silence (a biostratigraphically correct poem )
Get PDF1. South of Sidney, BC
Time is the sculpted element.In this moment, opposite the rockthat is James Island[...
Some Short Thoughts on Morality, Ecology and Nature
Get PDFNature Knows Best, and as Neil Evernden has pointed out perhaps facetiously, Ecology Knows Nature (1992: 8). However, for a number of reasons, these statements have become truisms for many of those who environmentalists — seems to reveal the moral order of being by simultaneously uncovering the verum, bonum and pulchrum of reality: it suggests not only the truth, but also a moral imperative and even aesthetic perfection" (Sachs, 1992: 32).
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Blue planet in a darker heaven ca 2 ga (and earlier)
No full textBefore geographyland has no mandate or mission.[...
Boundary Work in Regulatory Controversies
Get PDFThe regulation of technological risks is an area in which science and policy are generally linked in an inextricable fashion that Wynne aptly describes through the metaphor of the "regulatory jungle" (1992a). It involves a mixture of scientific, political and ethical issues, and due to the presence of scientific uncertainty on a significant scale, even the scientific issues cannot be answered by scientific means alone, but rely on policy considerations for their resolution. Seen from this perspective, controversies over technological risks come as no surprise.
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The Gendered Construction of Science
No full textSince the advent of the scientific revolution, science has been purported to transcend the realm of the social. In the Western world, this is a luxury only science to enjoy. lndeed, our tolerance seems to be built into the very foundations of the scientific methodology itself: scientific methods are selected such that all values are excluded from inquiry. The thinking follows that, when used properly, scientific method generates observations that are "objective" and results that are truly "value-free'. In light of the meaning that science imparts, forging a connection between gender and science presents itself as an immediate paradox; to unearth the issues which surround thb notion inevitably entails a kind of intellectual revolution. For feminist critiques of science, the task at hand is not an easy one. [...
"The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture" by Lawrence Buell
Get PDFEditorial
No full textPerhaps it might be best to begin here, with the particularities of the space in which UnderCurrents is produced. In its rather desultory isolation from the intensities of the city of Toronto, and its somewhat ironic "distance" from the mythos of the wild, UnderCurrents is both figuratively and literally situated at a juncture between the realms of culture and nature. For readers familiar with this journal, part of what we have attempted to negotiate over the years has been some of the conceptual boundaries which work to bracket and divide these intimately inseparable realms. In essence, UnderCurrents has sought to define something of a liminal, in-between space from which to consider various problematics of nature and the "natural". This project exists in what is strictly speaking, the 'suburban.' York University happens at edges of both Canada's largest metropolis and the nation's most densely populated and highly 'cultivated' cottage and farm country. Beside the woodlot stands the mall, and within this nexus, we sit in a three-story, neatly partitioned, sealed glass building which houses the Faculty of Environmental Studies . Needless to say, this site is full of contradictions. And yet there is, most definitely, a here here. Like any place, it has its pleasures, conditions of power, regulatory structures and regimes, deprivations, excesses and economies. As such, and in consideration of its multitude of contradictions, we find this to be an apropos site from which to instantiate some discussions about an equally contradictory figure we initially termed, and perhaps now, after putting this journal together, can only provisionally call, "natural space".
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On EMBODIED KNOWING AND RESISTANCE In Lefebvre's Theory of the Production of Space
Get PDFNow I a fourfold vision see/ And a fourfold vision is given to me/ Tis fourfold in my supreme delight/ And threefold in soft Beulah's night/ And two-fold always/ May God us keep from single vision and Newton's sleep
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