The Climate Change Project, City of Mississauga
This SDUK broadsheet takes COMMUTING as its theme. Alongside the most familiar usage of “commuting” (moving to and from work), the contributions in this issue touch on many aspects of circulation, migration, and change that are flowing across and rumbling below the surface of the Earth. As this publication platform traces the diffusion of knowledge, this issue in particular explores the shifts, displacements, and movements we must consider in an age of rapid global change in order to commute the Earth’s death sentence. We know you open this broadsheet with many questions, interests, and curiosities already formed, so here are a few places to start:
In seeking a fuller picture of what human consumption habits do, many are asking: “How are local environments impacted by the global circulation of goods?” Artist projects by Dana Prieto and Sydney Hart trace the effects of commercial flows (Canadian mining operations in Argentina and the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway, respectively) on landscapes, humans, and non-humans. A contribution from Canada’s Waste Flow identifies waste’s trajectories and provides opportunities to think beyond the landfill.
Those who are often caught in in-between movements to school, work, and home may wonder: “How do our daily migrations come to bear on our relationships to each other?” Contributions by Stanka Radović, Fraser McCallum, and the City of Mississauga’s Climate Change Project ponder commuting culture’s realities and technologies, while profiles of CultureLink, Ecosource, Great Lakes Water Walk, the Southern Ontario Centre for Atmospheric Aerosol Research, Toronto and Region Conservation Authority’s Multicultural Connections Program, and Walk + Roll Peel highlight other kinds of movement-making and -building.
Here on the shores of the Great Lakes, it is our responsibility to ask what is held in histories of water. Natasha Naveau’s artist project ᔥᑲᑲᒥᒃᐌᑭᑐ centres the waters of the Humber River in placemaking, Andrea Muehlebach offers propositions for moving beyond the ownership of water, and Harvey Shear outlines a brief history of the Lake Ontario Waterkeeper.
The question of “where we are seeing the effects of over-accumulation, of the desire to have more?” is taken up in an excerpt from Matt Hern and Am Johal’s Global Warming and the Sweetness of Life on Fort McMurray and the Alberta tar sands, and in D.T. Cochrane’s “What is The Market?” Both texts highlight a need to rethink what it means for an economy to balance itself out.
Finally, “How can we harness our knowledge of natural systems and cycles to predict, adapt, and imagine?” Satellite images annotated by Kent Moore illustrate the complexity of the climate system, and an artist project by Karolina Sobecka meditates on the social dimensions of cloud formation. Michelle Murphy’s “Afterlife and Decolonial Chemical Relations” explores how we might grapple with the life cycles of contaminants as they are bound up with the bodily effects of colonization.
Each of The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge broadsheets ends with a glossary—a tool not only geared to untangling the vocabularies of art and science, but also to building and evolving a set of key concepts. While each issue of the broadsheet can be read individually, we are attentive to how these publications and the issues they address might begin to form a network of ideas. This issue’s glossary entries expand on those explored in Issue 01: GRAFTING, and we encourage you to read across previous (and future) broadsheets.