This paper examines interlinkages between environmental contamination and health in traumatized water ecologies in Mexico, providing opportunities to rethink the epistemic relations causality and care.
Long abstract:
Water ecologies (rivers, lakes, wetlands, marshes, ground water wells and boreholes) are critical contexts of and for health. They are at the nexus of late-industrial nature-cultures and their contaminating pathways. They coalesce the forces of climate change, infrastructural degradation, obsolescence and waste (Fortune 2011). Nutrient leaching, heavy metal accumulations, chemical seepage and plastic residues bring into relief histories of industrial and agricultural extractions, traumatized ecologies and species survival. Their embodied consequences matter in new and challenging ways. Increasing rates of unexplained kidney failure as instances of climate change and environmental harms pull the multiple problematics of water contamination into view. The paper discusses the Chapala-Lerma River basin in Mexico as site for reframing the epistemic ground of causality and care in the context of contamination.