Mining sick: Creatively unsettling normative narratives about industry,environment, extraction,and the health geographies of rural,remote, northern,and Indigenous communities in British Columbia

Rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous communities on Turtle Island are routinely—as Cree Elder Willie Ermine says—pathologized. Social science and health scholarship, including scholarship by geographers, often constructs Indigenous human and physical geographies as unhealthy, diseased, vulnerable, and undergoing extraction. These constructions are not inaccurate: peoples and places beyond urban metropoles on Turtle Island live with higher burdens of poor health; Indigenous peoples face systemic violence and racism in colonial landscapes; rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous geographies are sites of industrial incursions; and many rural and remote geographies remain challenging for diverse Indigenous peoples. What, however, are the consequences of imagining and constructing people and places as “sick”? Constructions of “sick” geographies fulfill and extend settler (often European white) colonial narratives about othered geographies. Rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous geographies are discursively “mined” for narratives of sickness. This mining upholds a sense of health and wellness in southern, urban, Euro‐white‐settler imaginations. Drawing from multi‐year, relationship‐based, cross‐disciplinary qualitative community‐informed experiences, and anchored in feminist, anti‐colonial, and anti‐racist methodologies that guided creative and humanities‐informed stories, this paper concludes with different stories. It unsettles settler‐colonial powers reliant on constructing narratives about sickness in others and consequently reframes conversations about Indigenous well‐being and the environment.     

Inconsistent,downplayed, and pathologized: How mining's gendered impacts are considered in BC environmental assessment

To what extent do mining environmental assessments in British Columbia (BC) consider gendered impacts? How are they considered? And how are these considerations shaped during the environmental assessment process? To answer these questions we undertook a systematic review of all completed BC mining environmental assessments between 1995 and 2019 (n = 37). Through a careful reading of documentation archived in the BC Environmental Assessment Office registry, we found that 60% of projects did not consider the gendered impacts of mining development; the remaining 40% of projects inconsistently assessed gendered impacts. While noting an increase in gender considerations in environmental assessments since 1995, also quantified in our results is what has not changed. Even where gender is considered, the assessments often collapse this concern into one of “women's issues,” obscuring intersectional impacts and downplaying violence along racialized and gender diverse lines, including those experienced by Indigenous women, children, two-spirit, trans, queer and non-binary people. Environmental assessment is a regulatory tool designed to adjudicate the impacts of mining projects, yet our results lead us to conclude that it is also a tool of environmental injustice, compounding and further sedimenting heteropatriarchal and racialized patterns produced through generations of settler colonial resource extraction in BC.     

THE DECLINE OF CALIFORNIA'S NORTH COAST REDWOOD REGION

The Redwood Timber Region of Northern California has experienced a gradual decline in its natural resource base combined with intensified struggles over preservation and conservation. This region is used as a case study for examining the historic pattern of resource decline, the ambiguous roles of environmentalist pressure, the failure of public regulation, and a range of regional responses to economic decline. In this case, more intense forest management techniques (herbicides, fertilizer, thinning), more public investment in timber regeneration programs, and the emergence of an underground economy in marijuana growing are core elements of the response to resource decline. Theoretical, political, and environmental problems with these approaches are examined.     

Inclusive partnership: enhancing student engagement in geography

Partnership is currently the focus of much work within higher education and advocated as an important process to address a range of higher education goals. In this paper, we propose the term inclusive partnership to conceptualise a non-selective staff–student relationship. While recognising the challenges of inclusive partnership working for institutions, staff and students, this paper outlines the opportunities it offers and provides detailed case studies of inclusive partnerships within the geography curriculum. We conclude with some guiding principles to inform the development of inclusive partnerships in a range of settings.     

E.A. Markham’s St. Caesare: the other “Ulster”?

This essay examines the invented Caribbean island of St. Caesare and its relation to the representational space of “Ulster” in Montserratian poet E.A. Markham’s collection Letter from Ulster and the Hugo Poems (1993). As the title of the book implies, it unites two of the poet’s home islands, Ireland and Montserrat. Ireland was Markham’s home at the moment when he drafted many of these poems, as he was Writer-in-Residence at the University of Ulster at Coleraine from 1988 to 1991. However, as a Caribbean writer of Afro-Irish heritage, Ireland is also home in that it represents a “hinterland”. Of the Caribbean islands, Montserrat is the most closely identified with Ireland owing to its Irish cultural inheritance, which has earned it the nickname “The Emerald Isle of the Caribbean”. This article surveys Markham’s depictions of St. Caesare and “Ulster” as analytical spaces that enable him to chart the palimpsestic topologies of Montserrat and Northern Ireland. The author argues that Markham limns St. Caesare and “Ulster” as transatlantic mirror images to allow for critical relationality between Montserrat and Northern Ireland.