My paper focuses on two cleaning technologies installed at Indian railway stations under the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (SBA) and its Swachh Rail programme: PET bottle crushing machines and bio-toilets. The operative discourse surrounding these technologies is ecological. Bottle crushers are justified by compliance with the Plastic Waste Management Rules and National Green Tribunal orders; bio-toilets by preventing the discharge of excreta and wastewater onto tracks. But who feeds the bottles into the crushers, and what happens when the machines fail? I argue that installing technology does not guarantee a clean station. Rather than displacing caste-based cleaning labour, these technologies compound it. Workers, predominantly Dalit, lower-class and female, must not only continue their primary cleaning tasks but also maintain, repair and compensate for the failures of machines they work alongside, while remaining absent from the policy narratives that celebrate them. Further, I argue that techno-optimism, enables eco-casteism, producing relations in the station, concerning cleaning labour, urban waste management, and technology, that deepen existing inequalities. The ecological discourse naturalises Dalit workers in degrading roles, making their labour indispensable yet invisible. I show how waste management is negotiated in the station such that plastic bottles that do not reach the PET bottle crushing machines become part of the urban waste commons . I draw on ethnographic fieldwork at two railway stations in Hyderabad, Telangana, including 72 interviews with cleaning workers, their supervisors, and railway management, and on policy documents. My paper contributes to urban political ecology, Dalit ecology, urban public infrastructure, technology and commons, and anti-caste scholarship by demonstrating that postcolonial ecological governance reproduces caste exploitation through the very technologies that claim to displace it. I make four contributions. First, I show how SBA, despite claiming to diverge from colonial sanitation, reproduces its caste and class logics. Second, I foreground the railway station as a spatial and institutional context largely absent from scholarship on caste and sanitation technology. Third, I show how green discourse legitimises the caste structuring of waste work. Fourth, I examine how technological breakdowns redistribute labour. Overall, I demonstrate how eco-casteism is operative in postcolonial ecological governance.
The 2023–2025 escalation of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah triggered widespread displacement across South Lebanon while simultaneously generating extensive environmental destruction that continues to undermine prospects for return. This article examines how warfare-induced ecological damage including white phosphorus contamination, bombardment, deforestation, and the destruction of agricultural infrastructure, reshapes displacement trajectories in agrarian borderland communities. Drawing on an interdisciplinary framework integrating environmental displacement theory, critical refugee studies, and political ecology, the study analyzes qualitative interviews with displaced agricultural workers whose livelihoods depend on land, water systems, and biodiversity. The findings demonstrate that displacement in South Lebanon cannot be understood solely as a response to immediate violence, but also to warfare-induced environmental transformation. Instead, environmental degradation including burned olive groves, contaminated soil, damaged irrigation networks, livestock loss, and disrupted agricultural cycles, has destabilized the ecological foundations that sustain rural life. Even where residents physically return, recovery remains partial and uncertain as farmers confront declining soil productivity, crop disease, market distrust, and persistent fears of contamination. Environmental destruction therefore converts temporary evacuation into protracted displacement by eroding the environmental systems that sustain local economies and social reproduction. By foregrounding ecological viability as a condition for return, the article argues that conflict-induced displacement in agrarian regions is shaped not only by security dynamics but by the transformation of landscapes themselves. Durable return, therefore, depends as much on environmental restoration as on the cessation of violence.
Drawing on analyses of the social drivers of environmental change, this paper theorizes and explores the historically specific and complex dialectical relationship between militarism, political economy, and ecological transformation through a historical case study of the herbicide campaign during the American War in Vietnam. This article synthesizes theories of the military-environment relationship with metabolic analysis by conceptualizing the military as a second-order mediation emerging from, and interacting with, capital's social metabolism. Militaries as second-order mediations influence the reproduction of capital's social metabolic order in two ways: they appropriate resources from commercial producers for destructive purposes and exercise power over how those resources are used. By analyzing archival material—official reports and declassified documents—and secondary sources, this study demonstrates how the US military's use of herbicides was shaped by the logic of the rational management of war and its need for quantifiable and calculable data. As a result, the US military imposed a state-spatial rationality on the land and generated unique metabolic rifts in multiple Vietnamese ecosystems. This article broadens our understanding of the social drivers of environmental change by integrating two distinct theoretical traditions, underlining the importance of studying the military-economy-environment nexus and serving as a foundation for understanding ecological degradation and crisis.
With the fracturing of the global order, and as climate negotiations and agreements are increasingly weakened, ignored, or strategically undermined by powerful nations, corporations, and geopolitical actors, we are witnessing a renewed and troubling return to fossil fuel extractivism at the center of global discourse. In this moment of regression and uncertainty, there is an urgent need to rethink not only climate policy but also how climate change itself has been articulated, understood, and mobilized over time. We show how a mapping of diverse climate articulations allows us to analytically consider the varied ways in which climate concerns manifest across science, policy, and public discourse. These articulations, which we identify as co-optive, instrumental, and transformative, are not neutral; they are constructed, contested, and deployed by actors with varying degrees of power to shape priorities, allocate resources, and define responsibility across scales. The analysis situates climate action within institutional logics, geopolitical hierarchies, and sociopolitical conditions to move beyond binaries and recognize the plurality of ways that climate is articulated, how it comes to matter, and the dynamic, unstable, and uneven ways these articulations materialize over time. We argue that climate articulations are not merely interpretive, but constitutive of the political economy of climate governance, thereby opening up possibilities for both the reproduction of existing inequalities and the emergence of transformative and more just climate futures oriented towards equity, accountability, and systemic change.
In 2015, The City of Tucson, Arizona became recognized as a UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy, a title that has become central to its food tourism efforts and other projects of "gastrodevelopment." This title recognizes Tucson's unique and diverse food heritage and agricultural histories, which have been molded into a food story that has been articulated in the application to UNESCO and in local media and branding materials. This food story - a set of narratives about the region that have congealed into a more or less standardized form - is not merely a story, but holds symbolic and economic value for those telling it. In this article, we ask: what stories are told about Tucson's food histories, and who is telling them? Through an analysis and reflection on local food media, we approach Tucson's 'official' food story as a settler food story: a form of narration that centers and upholds white and settler conceptions of heritage, space, and place. Our analysis demonstrates how Indigenous knowledge and practices are portrayed as part of the past, separate from 'modernity'; how Indigenous spaces are imagined as empty frontiers awaiting discovery by cunning white artisans and curious consumers; and how white subjectivities, discourses, and practices of consumption occupy the center of Tucson's 'official' food story. In closing, we argue that these story lines - ones which operate under the banner of gastronomic 'multiculturalism' - play a role in reproducing forms of historical erasure, symbolic violence, and inequity within Tucson's mainstream gastrodevelopment project and contemporary food system. In closing, we call for these stories to be pluralized, reimagined, and brought into alignment with food justice and Indigenous food futures.
