Situating Justice in the Environment: The Case of BHP at the Ok Tedi Copper Mine

The rubric of sustainable development has now gained wide theoretical and political acceptance in the global community. However, after the Rio Declaration, each nation must now confront the specific question of how to decide between those industries and activities that are sustainable and those that are not when conflicting social and ecological interests are at stake. Any fundamental change to resource allocation will have social distributional consequences, and the issue of justice therefore becomes a critical element of any sustainability formulation. This paper contributes to this debate by exploring the potential for a politically grounded theory of justice in and to the environment. More specifically, we argue for a situated analysis that nevertheless retains the postulate of a neo-Kantian universal ethic as the foundation for global institutions that could integrate and safeguard the principles of justice and ecological responsibility underpinning most notions of sustainability. We show this by locating the question of justice in a particular conflict of interest, that between the Australian mining giant Broken Hill Proprietary, Ltd., and the traditional landowners of an area on the Ok Tedi river in Papua New Guinea.     

Biopower, genetics and livestock breeding: (re)constituting animal populations and heterogeneous biosocial collectivities

Genetic techniques have become increasingly prevalent in livestock breeding, associated with new types of knowledge-practice and changes in the institutional and geographical relationships related to animal husbandry. This paper examines the value of Foucault's concept of 'biopower' to theorising livestock breeding and the implications of the rise of genetic knowledge-practices in agriculture, developing the concept to apply to nonhuman animals and to situations where humans and nonhuman animals are co-constituted through particular knowledge-practices and corporeal meetings. It focuses on the idea of 'population' as a central component of biopower, and relates this to conceptualisations of biosocial collectivity. Reacting to the inherent humanism of Foucault's outlining of biopower, the paper argues for its relevance in relation to nonhuman populations, and for heterogeneous conceptualisations of biosocial collectivity. Drawing on research with UK beef cattle and sheep breed societies, the paper explores how, in practice, populations are constructed in relation to the production of particular sorts of truths concerning, and particular modes of intervention in, the lives of nonhuman animals. It explores how heterogeneous biosocial collectivities are constituted around these interventions. The emergence of genetic techniques is shown to transform the processes constituting populations and heterogeneous biosocial collectivities, and this is discussed in terms of a new inflection of agricultural biopower associated with novel interventions in the lives of livestock animals.     

‘Well weather is not a girl thing is it?’ Contemporary amateur meteorology,gender relations and the shaping of domestic masculinity

Although there is a growing scholarship on the history of amateur meteorology, contemporary amateur meteorology has tended to remain a largely invisible social phenomenon. Moreover, questions of female involvement and gender relations therein have tended to be overlooked. This paper seeks to address this gap by drawing on interviews with members of one of the most important amateur meteorological networks in the UK—the Climatological Observers Link. The research identifies a predominantly male bias within amateur meteorology in the UK, offers insight into why and how this bias has emerged and explores the implications of this bias for gender politics in the home. It also considers the way in which, as a pursuit that is very much situated within the domestic sphere, amateur meteorology complicates traditional framings of the home as a female realm and contributes to a domestic masculinity.