The Climate Change Project, City of Mississauga
The SDUK broadsheet series takes aim at a broad range of concerns—and this issue, GRAFTING, explores how we come to know, define, and interact with nature, where we see its boundaries and identify its needs, and how we understand its entanglement with culture. Following on the origins of The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and in the spirit of publishing, questioning, and problematizing “useful knowledge,” we recognize our readers as curious people who may pick up this publication with certain questions already in mind.
Perhaps you are asking, “Where do nature and the city intersect? What does this mean for urbanism?” We suggest you begin with Shannon Mattern’s “How to Graft a City”; Morris Lum’s photo-graphic project on Cooksville, a Mississauga neighbourhood built on intercultural relationships and subject to both urban development and climatic events; or The Climate Change Project’s study of natural resource management.
We often wonder, “How can art and culture contribute to an understanding of nature-culture entanglement?” If you wonder this too, Amanda Boetzkes’s essay on grafting and contemporary art, and Kika Thorne’s artist project Tree Permit TP-2016-00332 Applicant John Ross... are both excellent points of departure for this exploration.
If you are interested in who is taking action on environmental issues in Mississauga, profiles of the Association for Canadian Educational Resources, Credit River Anglers Association, HOUSE Lab, Enabling Garden, Making Social Knowledge, and UTM’s Beehives provide short introductions to some important local initiatives, and Andrea Olive’s essay on the Credit Valley Conservation Authority offers additional in-depth analysis.
Landowners, residents, and entrepreneurs may be interested in asking, “What are the implications of environmental degradation on land ownership and the economy?” D.T. Cochrane and Fraser McCallum address this question through the lenses of economics and biodiversity, respectively.
“How is climate change related to Indigenous knowledge, sovereignty, and kinship?” is a central, vital question for reckoning with our relationship to land and the legacies of colonialism. It is taken up by many contributors in this issue, but you might begin with EDAction & CLEAR’s “Pollution is Colonialism” and then move on to Heather Davis and Zoe Todd’s "Decolonizing the Anthropocene."
In the face of environmental catastrophe, many of us are asking, “How do we reckon with time? How do we repair? What can we do?” If you are too, a poem by Julie Joosten exploring the many histories bound up in climate’s present may deeply resonate with you, and Kyle Powys Whyte’s “Climate Change as an Unprecedentedly Old Catastrophe” may offer some ideas for grappling with the timeline(s) of climate change and prevention. The Leap Manifesto calls for a Canada based on caring for each other and the planet, moving swiftly to a post-carbon future, upholding Indigenous rights, and pursuing economic justice for all.
Finally, this publication closes with a glossary—a tool designed to help define the unfamiliar, but also describe, develop, connect, and trouble existing terminology. Words, too, are shifting ground, and each broadsheet’s glossary will respond to its contents, accumulating new language, and attesting to the need for a complex, entangled lexicon that equips us to learn, understand, and confront a rapidly changing world.