Michael DiRisio
Circular economy: The aspiration for an economic system where inputs (of energy, goods, or services) and outputs are equal, thereby producing no excesses or wastes. Circular economies are premised on creative forms of reuse and recycling (see De Luna and McCallum SDUK05), but barriers to their ultimate implementation include unpayable debts (see Xiang) and the oversights of economics (see Cochrane).
Combustion: A chemical process where a fuel source is combined with oxygen and ignited, producing heat and some form of exhaust. Combustion for energy production—burning coal and natural gas—has profound environmental impacts, and continues to increase despite the so-called turn to post-industrial society (see Diamanti, SDUK03). On a smaller scale, controlled burns are used in conservation to manage the amount of combustible material in naturalized areas (see Hobler).
Cosmology is the philosophy and science that seeks to understand the structure of the universe. An expansive sphere of thought, cosmology can refer to astronomy and physics, and to mythological, religious, or metaphysical knowledges (see Robinsong). A turn toward eco-cosmology (as described in Pereux & Ricco) considers diverse forms of life in the universe beyond the human, attuned to the interrelations and exchanges between living matter and other entities and things.
Chokepoint: Derived from military vernacular, suggests a congestion or blockage of physical space. By contrast, loopholes are conscious or unconscious omissions (often in law), permitting an action normally prohibited. Both terms offer opportunities for exploitation or loss—depending which side you’re on. Orit Halpern explains how chokepoints apply to gold mining logistics and supply, while the Blue Dot Movement strives to close legal loopholes for environmental protection (Weber).
Credit: A relationship where one party trusts another to repay a debt. Despite the complexity of modern finance—where credit enables bets not only on future returns, but on other bets themselves—its purview is nevertheless based in material benchmarks (see Halpern), and social relations that determine value (see Cochrane). Mississauga’s Credit River, known as Missinihe to the Mississaugas of the Credit, was named for riverside meeting places where the Mississaugas and French fur traders would trade furs on credit.
Criminalization turns an individual (or an activity) into a criminal (or criminal offense) by making their actions illegal. Criminalization can be subverted by transgressing the law as a form of protest, a common tactic employed by Extinction Rebellion activists. These tactics come at greater risks, however, for people who are unduly criminalized along lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability (see Wretched of the Earth).
Debt: A thing owed. Debt can be social, as a debt of gratitude, or financial, as in a monetary debt, though these two categories are often deeply entangled. Debt is marked by imbalances of power (creating the uneasy position of indebtedness), which has widespread implications as the wealth of prosperous countries has been extracted at a social and environmental cost to poorer ones (see Xiang, and Halpern).
Evaluation is a judgement within a given value system: economic, moral, or otherwise (see Cochrane). Value systems are held in common, but comprise the choices of individual actors. Evaluation can be achieved through various means, as in Erin Robinsong’s characterization of weather phenomena as indicators of value, or Alize Zorlutuna’s reading of coffee grounds as an evaluation of the present.
Exploration commonly refers to travel to new lands, and is thus inseparable from colonial histories of survey and cartography (see Devine) and ongoing forms such as mining exploration (see Cochrane, DiRisio, and Halpern). However, colonialism does not exhaust the possibilities latent in exploration—it can be driven by curiosity and interest, directed toward ideas, concepts, emotions, or social relations. What does exploration look like without exploitation?
Fuel is an energy source with some degree of liquidity—that is, an accessible or readily usable product. Whereas fuel colloquially refers to petrochemical products, scientists, engineers, and biologists often think of fuel expansively to include sunlight, water, and wind. Advocates for alternative fuel sources highlight the pollutive effects of burning fossil fuels, while suggesting that harmful byproducts can be replaced with useful ones (see De Luna).
The Global North and Global South designate areas of uneven economic development. The descriptive was coined by the World Bank to update other totalizing designations such as “third world.” These terms can describe states that have historically been negatively impacted by globalization or be used in solidarity with countries who actively resist the globalizing mission. The Wretched of the Earth use the latter sense to call for accountability from the Global North; while Xiang uses the dichotomy to describe the Global North’s predatory lending programs.
Gold is a chemical element and precious metal whose value arises from its rarity and capital-intensive mining process (see Halpern). Beyond gold’s practical uses in jewelry and industrial applications (electronics, medicine, and emerging energy technologies—see De Luna), its limited supply means it’s stockpiled in reserves to underwrite national central banks, which thereby makes gold crucial to economic theory and policy (see Cochrane in this issue and throughout the SDUK column series).
Horizon: In a landscape, the apparent line between land or water and sky (see Zorlutuna); also, a boundary or separation between spaces (see Devine). The true horizon is often obstructed by geological formations, forests, and the built environment, barring direct sightlines to an open sky (see Bureau of Linguistical Reality). Symbolically, the horizon’s breadth and distance have come to denote futurity, hope, attainment, forecasting, warning, foretelling (see Robinsong).
Legacy: Something carried over from an earlier time, with multiple and diverse implications: the transmission of knowledge (see Zorlutuna), after-effects of environmental destruction (see DiRisio; Pereux and Ricco), histories of conflict and settler-colonialism (see Devine), and reverberations of individual political and economic decision-making (see Bureau of Linguistical Reality). Legacy is also often tied to notions of ancestry, kinship, and lineage (see Cuthand).
Logistics: Management of the materials and basic functions of any complex operation, commonly in commercial and military applications. Global logistics management organizes the production, circulation, transport, supply, regulation/deregulation, and consumption of commodities worldwide. Increasingly, logistics operations rely on automated computer systems which predict, track, and allocate business resources—from raw materials, to production capacity, to finances (see Halpern).
Resource: A material or immaterial asset, commonly a sum of money, raw material, or access to labour (as in human resources). Extractive industries require massive reserves of non-renewable resources, such as fossil fuels, metals, and minerals (see Halpern; DiRisio); and labour from communities that often have little access to wealth generated in the process (see Cuthand; Xiang).
Sequestration commonly refers to the capture and reuse of carbon dioxide emissions from the atmosphere. Carbon sequestration is an urgent task for green energy technologies (see De Luna), but the term can also refer to naturally occurring forms of sequestration threatened by climate change, such as CO2 released amid thawing permafrost in the Arctic.
Sounding is a process to determine underwater depth, often used to create bathymetric maps of navigable waters (see Devine). Sounding historically employed lead weights hung from ropes, but the modern technique of echo sounding employs sonar. Sounding originates not from the word “sound” in its aural sense, but from the geographic term denoting an inlet.
Speculation refers to undertaking an investment that holds the risk of loss, but also the potential of sizable gain (see Halpern; DiRisio; and Cochrane, who explore hedging bets on the future values of natural resources). In broader use speculation also includes theorizing, wonder, prediction (see Zorlutuna), reflection, and decision-making in the face of uncertainty.