Despite irrefutable evidence that asbestos causes asbestosis, lung cancer, and mesothelioma, asbestos mining, milling, and manufacturing continue. The authors discuss three scientific debates over the roles of fiber types, viruses, and genetics in the development of mesothelioma. While these controversies might appear internal to science and unconnected to policies of the global asbestos industry, they argue that scientific debates, whether or not fostered by industry, play a central role in shaping conceptualization of the problem of asbestos-related disease. In South Africa, India, and elsewhere, these controversies help to make the disease experience of asbestos-exposed workers and people in asbestos-contaminated communities invisible, allowing the asbestos industry to escape accountability for its practices.

No abstract

A tendency in studies of science in colonial Africa is to focus on the "big politics" of resource extraction, environmental control, and the governmentality of subject bodies. As a result, we now recognize that colonial science was a highly political enterprise in which the pursuit of knowledge was infused with the dynamics of starkly exclusionary societies and extractive regimes. Scientific improvements in medicine and agriculture yielded benefits that underwrote colonial projects 1 and the construction of authoritative knowledge in medicine, racial biology, and social science created disciplinary power over Africans as scientifically objectified colonial subjects. 2 It has been observed that the failure of science to heed indigenous knowledge led to a "misreading" of the landscape and inappropriate intervention. 3 Recently, some historians have attempted to mitigate overly stark depictions of colonial science, making good cases that the practice of scientific ecology, agronomy, and medicine in colonial Africa had motivations and effects beyond the service of extraction and governmentality. 4 They have rightly informed us that the assessment of applied sciences in colonial Africa cannot be reduced to their role in European domination. Clearly, these are critical issues that merit attention. Yet the focus on ways science did (or did not) support various colonial agendas may have impeded the development of a more representative understanding of Euro-American scientific pursuits in African colonies. Non-instrumentalist sciences such as ornithology, lepidoptery, and noneconomic botany ranked high among scientific pursuits in Africa, but as Acknowledgments: Archival materials held at the Ornithology and Rothschild Library of the Natural History Museum, Tring, U.K. are quoted and reproduced here by permission of the Trustees of the Natural History Museum. Materials from the R. E. Moreau archive are used with permission of the Oxford University Library Services, Alexander Library, Oxford. Every effort has been made to secure necessary permissions to reproduce copyrighted material in this work, though in some cases it has proved impossible to trace copyright holders. If any omissions are brought to our notice we will be happy to include appropriate acknowledgments on reprinting in any subsequent edition.

This paper addresses bush encroachment around Kuruman, South Africa. The 'received wisdom' is that bushes result from overgrazing, displace the climax community, and lower carrying capacity. In contrast, this paper is informed by non-equilibrium ecological and range management science, as well as recent challenges to degradationist interpretations about environmental change in Africa. To what extent has bush encroachment occurred? Has a consequent drop in sustainability contributed to dependence upon wage labour among black households? Using documentary evidence, the paper establishes a broad chronology for change. It asserts that because of non-human and human factors black herders live in a bushier environment than they did when the first travellers arrived around 1800. It concludes with oral evidence to consider the effects of the change. Interviews show that people do not consider bush encroachment to be an environmental problem. They are too poor to keep many grazing cattle, and the browsing small stock and donkeys they can afford are well suited to bushes. Also, because bushes survive drought better than grass, they are valued fodder for all animals. Dependence upon wage labour results from wider social factors and this environmental change has not degraded livelihoods.

This paper considers the intensification of agriculture along racial lines in South Africa by looking at the history of one spring and nine miles of river valley. It illustrates how racial conflict included struggles over nature, and how whites and blacks had different perceptions and abilities regarding its exploitation.The ‘Eye’ of Kuruman is a large spring in a semi-arid region. Tswana herders originally used it as a water hole. Their food production system was extensive, making use of wide areas rather than increasing output in a limited area. Pastoralism was more important than agriculture. Irrigation, introduced by representatives of the London Missionary Society, was not widely practiced away from the missions until a subsistence crisis during the 1850s. It continued after the crisis passed. However, households continued to operate with the logic of extensive production, fitting irrigation into the pre-existing system.In 1885, tne British annexed the region as part of the Crown Colony of British Bechuanaland. They demarcated African reserves at springs and in river valleys, and grazing lands were opened for white settlement. The upper Kuruman valley was designated a Crown reserve and the Eye became a town site. Downstream were Tswana households which cultivated with less security than on a native reserve. Land alienation with rinderpest devastated stock keeping and caused a widespread famine at the turn of the century, yet Tswana cultivators did not greatly intensify their use of irrigable lands. More extensive methods endured and wage labor became the basis of support.In the twentieth century under Union government, use of the Eye intensified, and access to the valley became segregated by race. After 1918 the municipality of Kuruman operated a modern irrigation project, and in 1919, evicted black cultivators living at the Eye. Blacks continued to live and garden at Seodin, five miles downstream, but suffered water shortages which made even their casual irrigation impossible. Political expediency dictated against their pressing for water rights. In the 1940s the Department of Native Affairs drilled boreholes, but these were not sufficient to sustain cultivation. In 1962, the policy of Apartheid mandated the removal of blacks from Seodin. Despite state aid, the whites-only irrigation project never developed into a commercial success.