The Climate Change Project, City of Mississauga
Accounting: The process of measuring an economic entity. Often used in a financial sense (see Cochrane), accounting can also refer to systems of value, including “natural asset valuation” (see Climate Change Project), or other methods of calculating and assessing the quantity, worth, or substance of something (see LEAP; Local Useful Knowledge). Accounting assumes stable and agreed-upon understandings of something’s value, but can also refer to a testimony, an account of the facts, a narration. Who is counting? Who determines an asset’s value and usefulness? Whose account of the facts counts?
Adaptation: In environmental policy, is a strategic process of adjusting to climate change and managing risks associated with known consequences. Adaptation is often discussed in tandem with Mitigation, which aims to tackle the root causes of climate change (see Climate Change Project; Local Useful Knowledge). In biology, adaptation refers to features that evolve in a population because they offer some advantage. In each sense, adaptation refers to the capacity for change—in a cultural context, it may also align with notions of resilience, or track necessary, long-endured, and under-recognized shifts (see Whyte). Adaptation and mitigation are important corrective measures, but they cannot function without a collective reckoning with the systemic and historical foundations of environmental violence.
Anthropocene: From the Greek anthropos for “human” and cene for “new,” this proposed term describes the current epoch of major human impact on Earth. This neologism is hotly contested—both by those who contend that we remain in the Holocene (as our official current geological epoch is termed), and by those who suggest that the term “Anthropocene” does not do enough to describe how human impact on the earth has been unevenly influenced by the distribution of power, capital, and time across the globe. Alternative suggestions include Capitalocene (in order to reflect capitalism’s responsibility for environmental devastation), Chthulucene (a future epoch where human and animal kinships are renewed in response to climate change), and the Plantationocene (see Plantation in this glossary). See Davis & Todd, and Hall, who put the Anthropocene in temporal and decolonial contexts.
Brownfield: In urban planning, a site that has been previously developed but is not currently in use. Often used in reference to sites that have been contaminated, brownfield land contrasts with greenfield land, which has intentionally been left undeveloped (see Mattern).
Carapace: An outer shell (see Boetzkes)—either metaphorically (e.g. a psychological defense mechanism), or literally (e.g. the shell of a turtle, or the dorsal section of a crustacean’s exoskeleton).
Catastrophe: A disastrous and often sudden event. How sudden? Many disaster researchers argue that ecological catastrophe is significantly different from natural disaster, because human-caused environmental degradation slowly lays the groundwork for collapse. See Whyte’s Climate Change: An Unprecedentedly Old Catastrophe and the LEAP Manifesto, or consider the invasion of the Emerald Ash Borer (McCallum), and the 2013 Mississauga ice storm (Climate Change Project).
Chaoide: A philosophical concept coined by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to describe a linguistic or artistic form (including poetry, science, or performance) that is capable of moving us from chaos to comprehensibility (see Boetzkes). The concept of chaoide may be effective in describing how attempts to grasp and discern the scale of environmental crisis may emerge from a sense of overwhelm—and move towards an understanding of ecological complexity, human entanglement, and opportunities for action.
Effluent: Water pollution; often wastewater, sewage, or gas released into a natural body of water. The term comes from the Latin effluere, “to flow out,” and refers to any flowing offshoot of a river or lake—now much more sinister (see EDAction & CLEAR).
Era: In geology, a subdivision of geologic time (for example, the Phanerozoic eon contains the Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic eras). Historians use the concept of an “era” to organize time around a specific event or ruling regime (e.g. “The Roman era”), often privileging, naming, and structuring knowledge around power and control. See Davis & Todd, Hall, Joosten, and Whyte on seeing time across human and geological scales.
Extraction: may refer to the physical process of extracting resources, but also, as Davis & Todd describe, to “logics of extraction (of bodies, land, minerals, fossil fuels)” that see everything as a resource available for capture (see also EDAction & CLEAR; and LEAP).
Fault line: In geology, a visible fracture in the ground caused by the shifting of the earth’s tectonic plates. In general usage, a place of friction and potential failure, often when opposing forces are brought into tension—this can be physical, but may also refer to fissures in systems of knowledge (see Joosten).
GPS, or Global Positioning System, is navigation technology that comprises satellites, ground stations, and receivers. Originally a military technology, GPS’s popularization in the 2000s has had significant impacts—in terms of convenience, efficiency, infrastructure, and surveillance (see Boetzkes).
Infrastructure refers to the basic physical structures of a society (see Lum for a portrait of Cooksville’s infrastructural relationship with the floodplain), but can also describe digital frameworks and data circulation (see Mattern). Infrastructure is closely related to land development, which can include redevelopment (see Kika Thorne’s artist project, which pictures the meeting of landscaping, gallery, and courthouse at the site of the Vancouver Art Gallery), and asset valuation (see the Climate Change Project).
Methylmercury: A toxic form of mercury often formed in aquatic systems through the action of bacteria in sediment, and historically produced through various industrial processes. Predatory fish in methylmercury-polluted waters accumulate higher rates of the toxicant through their diets, making fish-eating species (including humans) vulnerable to methylmercury poisoning (see EDAction & CLEAR).
Noösphere: The concept of a “sphere” in earth sciences describes the systems that compose the earth: the lithosphere (or geosphere, containing all the earth’s surface’s rocks), the hydrosphere (its waters), the atmosphere (its gases), and the biosphere (its living organisms). Encompassing and moving beyond these, the philosophical concept of noösphere describes the sphere of thought and knowledge—and its capacity to alter and transform the other four spheres (see Davis & Todd).
Plantations: Large-scale farms, particularly for monocultural cash crops, but sometimes including tree farms and reforestation efforts (see McCallum). In proposing the “Plantationocene” as an alternative term to the “Anthropocene,” scholars implicate corporate capitalism and slave labour in environmental depletion and devastation.
Reforestation: The process of replanting an area with trees—in contrast with Deforestation, the mass removal of trees (for human purposes such as agriculture, urban development, and logging, or by natural means including forest fires). Deforestation without reforestation can have drastic effects, including disease outbreak, habitat loss, changes to climate conditions, and the displacement of plant and animal species (see Olive; Thorne; and McCallum).
Self-determination describes a nation or people’s right to self-governance (see Davis & Todd) and autonomy. For Indigenous peoples in Canada, this refers to the recognition of a people’s power to make decisions about land, resources, and social programs, as well as the right to negotiate “nation-to-nation” with the Federal government (see EDAction & CLEAR; LEAP; and Andrea Olive’s discussion of the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation’s Water Claim).
Settler-colonialism is a form of colonialism. While “colonialism” generally refers to the creation or maintenance of colonies in other lands, often by exploitation of their peoples and lands, “settler-colonialism” describes settlers supplanting Indigenous peoples, with colonizers cultivating settler identity and sovereignty in order to support their continued occupation of land (see Davis & Todd; Joosten; Olive; EDAction & CLEAR; and Boetzkes).