This fourth broadsheet in the SDUK series is themed SHORING—a concept that touches on both literal shores (representing the meeting—or separation—of land and water), and broader representations of terraforming, resource extraction, data visualization, interdisciplinary research, and the many other supports that have held up existing infrastructures, exploitations, and innovations. A few questions might guide your encounter with this issue:
Repeat readers of the broadsheet series may note that this issue in particular is saturated with images, and thus asks, how can we read images of our world through the lens of environmental justice? Projects in this issue demonstrate the ability of photography to narrate and create access to remote climate and atmospheric research (Weaver), and to dispute and re-examine the stories images give us of ecosystems we may never encounter face-to-face (Morét). Meanwhile, an image by Lois Weinberger asks us to see histories, land-use, settlement, order, and disorder in the archaeological fragments shored up in private property (in this case, his parents’ Austrian farmhouse).
Those compelled by conversations about the shift from fossil-fuel reliance to sustainable energy may wonder, how can we see the effects of resource extraction and energy production when much of it is designed to remain obscure? Genevieve Robertson’s Still Running Water catalogues hydropower projects along the Columbia River, while poems from Laurel Albina’s Energy Series evoke the violence and invasiveness of mining and drilling, and Jessica Caporusso’s study of Mauritius’s “green” energy economies attends to their legacies of colonialism, slavery, and exploitation.
Following the impacts of resource extraction, a network of environmental consequences becomes perceptible. How do our coastal spaces become sites for the sites of intertwined human-environmental distress? Ruth Beer answers this question by scrutinizing the gas station at the junction of British Columbia’s Highways 16 and 37 in an ongoing project on trade and extraction routes in Western Canada, while Alison Cooley addresses Mississauga’s Lakeview Village Redevelopment as a site of urban reimagination and potential connectivity to the non-human. Synthetic Collective offer opportunities to respond to the “wicked problem” of plastics pollution through interdisciplinary research. Their contribution includes a directory of organizations working to confront plastics in oceans, beaches, and urban spaces—a tactic for sharing the existing work of important initiatives mirrored in our own “Local Useful Knowledge” section profiling organizations in the GTHA.
Those motivated by the prospect of entrepreneurialism and invention may wonder what role innovation plays in meeting the challenges of environmental collapse. Fraser McCallum’s profile of Just Vertical (a startup with origins at UTM) highlights the potential of indoor hydroponic gardening as a response to food insecurity, while, in a regular column by D.T. Cochrane, readers are encouraged to question the promise that innovation alone offers a way forward through climate crisis.
As in each broadsheet issue, we close with a glossary of terms—key concepts that are defined, animated, problematized, challenged, and illuminated over the course of the broadsheet series.