The Climate Change Project, City of Mississauga
Artifacts are objects created or modified by humans that are of some cultural significance. They often exist within the context of an archive, collection, or other system of classification, and are valuable for their relation to the broader grouping; consider Amy Balkin’s A People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting, where the objects speak to legacies of environmental violence, or Marina Roy’s Carrying Capacity, which catalogues the lives of fossil fuels. In another sense, artifacts are defined as something (a belief, behaviour, or concept) left behind by a particular institution or dominant strain of thought—for example, contemporary acts of racism and white supremacy as artifacts of regimes of colonialism and slavery (see Shotwell).
Bitumen, also called asphalt, is a black, gummy substance composed of hydrocarbons. It can occur naturally (sometimes called crude bitumen), accumulating in deposits formed from the remains of once-living organisms subject to intense heat and pressure under the earth’s surface (as in Los Angeles’s La Brea Tar Bits or Alberta’s Athabasca oil sands). Its more common form, manufactured bitumen, is a residue remaining after the distillation of petroleum (see Roy).
Chemical Valley refers to the concentration of forty percent of Canada’s petrochemical industry in Sarnia/Aamjiwnaang (see Xiang and Clear & EDAction, SDUK01). The site of over sixty refineries and chemical plants, Chemical Valley has been the subject of serious public health concerns, produced by cumulative effects of industrial pollutants which intermingle in the atmosphere, water, and soil. A site as well of significant community resistance the to the oil industry, Chemical Valley has also come to symbolize the failures of government and corporate environmental regulation to adequately safeguard public health.
Desire: A strong feeling of longing, want, hunger, sexual attraction, wishing, ambition, yearning, hope, greed, aspiration, infatuation, or craving (see Ross; Cochrane). For questions of desirability bearing on access to space, resources, services, and the relationship between the natural and built environment, see Tisiga.
The term emissions refers to diffusion of elements or substances, often used specifically in relation to greenhouse gas emissions (see Hughes; Diamanti; and Cochrane). The profound potential effects of climate warming caused by these emissions is detailed in this issue in “Open Letter to the Federal Government”.
Energy: Power or force derived from physical or chemical resources, referring to natural processes (e.g. solar, wind, geothermal) or power generated from the burning of fossil fuels (see Roy). Fossil fuels continue to be integral to our current economic system despite a shift in the Global North towards post-industrial societies (see Cochrane), an ongoing reliance described as energy deepening (see Diamanti). Also used to refer to vitality or activity; see Roy, who discusses art as a form of energy that challenges conventional productivity.
Environmental racism refers to the purposeful and disproportionate siting of pollutive industries or waste facilities near racialized communities. This term identifies unequal exposure to toxins and pollutants along racial lines. With its origins in the resistance of Black residents to a toxic landfill planned for their community in Warren County, North Carolina, environmental racism identifies how geography, race, and health are deeply intertwined (see CHANGE Lab). In Ontario, the decades-long resistance of Grassy Narrows First Nation to mercury poisoning is one ongoing case which bears the effects of environmental racism (for others, see Murphy in SDUK02).
GDP, or gross domestic product, is a value that represents the total goods and services produced in a defined region, typically a country, intended to indicate the health of its economy. Nominal GDP, which is not adjusted for inflation or deflation, can be distinguished from real GDP, which is measured against a base year and thus accounts for price changes. The current convention is that substantial growth in real GDP indicates a well-functioning economy, while minimal growth or a contraction marks a recession or (if ongoing) a depression. GDP growth is considered positive, regardless of the degree to which growth disproportionately expresses the preferences of the wealthy (see Cochrane) or impacts those who do not benefit (see externality).
GIS (or Geographic Information System) is a method of storing, analyzing, and visualizing spatial data. Contemporary GIS methods typically record environmental change using remote sensing technologies—the bird’s-eye view provided by satellites. GIS is used as an analytical tool at many different scales: at a regional scale in CHANGE Lab’s studies of place as a determinant of health (see their profile), or at the scope of global climate systems in the work of Kent Moore (see SDUK02).
Kinship: A network of relations between people based in a shared social context, typically defined by family ties or lineage. Kinship can mobilize biological ancestry, and can also consist of processes where individuals claim membership and affinity with a group, or take responsibility within it; the group may or may not recognize the individual’s claim (see Shotwell).
Methane capture is a process where methane gas emitted by industry or from landfills is diverted or stored, either to be further used as a source of energy, or burned (since the carbon dioxide produced from burning methane produces a far smaller environmental impact than the methane itself would). A component of larger emissions-reduction strategies, which also require deeper social, economic, and political restructuring (see Hughes).
Path dependency describes how previous actions and current contexts influence a progression of events. Diamanti discusses this in relation to fossil fuel, where energy use creates a setting within which more energy is required (see also energy).
Pollution: The release of a substance into the environment at a rate faster than it can be dispersed, decomposed, or converted into a non-toxic substance. Many (see Xiang; Clear & EDAction, SDUK01; Murphy, SDUK02) argue that pollution also functions as an index of systemic inequalities, with already-marginalized communities bearing its most deleterious effects (see environmental racism in this glossary).
Resilience is the ability to respond to change and adversity. It forms a pillar of climate-change planning, as resilience studies determine the extent to which an area is seen as responsive to environmental change (the Ontario Climate Consortium has executed several such studies). Forming connections between disciplinary boundaries, resilience studies examine infrastructure, architecture, emergency response, community connectedness, and other factors to determine how a place will respond to derivations from normal conditions (see Whyte in SDUK01 for a discussion of Indigenous nations’ resilience planning, and The Climate Change Project in that same issue for initiatives led by the City of Mississauga). As such, resilience is a mitigating factor when assessing risk for climate-change planning.
Risk: In a climate-change context, risk often refers to how the environment can be measured, calculated, and predicted for economic and legal ends such as insurance or infrastructure. It also involves assigning value or probability to unknown (and often unknowable) environmental conditions (see D.T. Cochrane’s recurring SDUK columns on the friction between the economy and the environment). In broader terms, risk management attempts to predict and plan for events that elude understanding and estimation, as in the “act of God” clause that appears in many insurance policies. For tangible examples of how risk factors into urban planning, see the work of the Ontario Climate Consortium.
In economic terms, scarcity describes a gap between limited resources and demand for those resources. But this definition of scarcity smoothes over the social and political dimensions of scarcity: Who lives in scarcity because of structural lack of access to resources and services? How does scarcity accrue in bodies, in relationships, across generations? (See Ross; Tisiga).
Typically understood to concern the use of force with the intent of causing harm (see Ross), violence also refers to the use of power to achieve symbolic victories at the expense of others’ freedom, safety, and well-being. This second connotation highlights the violence inherent in processes of settlement, extraction, and nation-building (see Shotwell; Andrialavidrazana; Davis & Todd, SDUK01) that underwrite the visibly violent processes of genocide and environmental destruction.