Dean Bavington, Managed Annihilation: an Unnatural History of the Newfoundland Cod Collapse (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010).

The prelude to industrial whaling: identifying the targets of ancient European whaling using zooarchaeology and collagen mass-peptide fingerprinting

“…This phenomenon is not without parallels in the annals of human resource exploitation, be it of marine or terrestrial/avian species. The examples of the passenger pigeon [29], the European sea sturgeon [27] and the northern cod [26] were noted above, and it has previously been argued that the Atlantic walruses (Odobenus rosmarus rosmarus) of mediaeval Greenland suffered a similar fate [31,72]. In the case of the grey whale and North Atlantic right whale, the process unfolded over centuries and entailed comparatively long-lived migratory taxa, thus making it difficult for a downward trajectory to be fully recognized or successfully reversed.…”

“…Classic cases of this phenomenon are known from both the recent and distant past, among both marine and terrestrial/avian fauna. Examples include the collapse of Newfoundland's northern cod (Gadus morhua) in 1992/1993 [26] and the European sea sturgeon (Acipenser sturio) in the early twentieth century [27], as well as the extinction of the great auk (Pinguinus impennis) in the mid-nineteenth century [28] and the passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) in the early twentieth century [29]. This phenomenon can be understood as an ecological dimension of the so-called resource curse, where (for complex cultural and ecological reasons) socio-environmental systems with initially abundant natural resources may not ultimately thrive [30,31].…”

The material politics of living in close proximity to our wastewaters: A case of decentralisation in the Netherlands

“…The article began by highlighting an ongoing political debate in the Netherlands that divides experts in the wastewater treatment field, about the merits of decentralised systems versus centralised systems, which figures wastewater infrastructures in terms of technological fixes in a deliberative arena. We proposed another way of thinking through wastewater infrastructures by attending to the material politics of waste and approaching technology not as flawless managerial 'fixes' (Bavington, 2011;Grabrys 2009;Tarr 1996), but as 'careful engagements' in which users are willing to learn about different ways of living with wastewater (Ureta, 2016;Ureta and Flores, 2018). We have presented three empirical examples that articulate the material politics of decentralisation in which wastewater practices become an explicit 'foreground' for their everyday users and in which living with waste is ordered as a distribution of pollution, a demarcation of water flows, and a transformation of waste.…”

(Re)Assembling Marine Space: Lobster Fishing Areas under Conditions of Technological and Legal Change in Atlantic Canada

“…Some fishermen push for a wide distribution of benefits in order to sustain coastal communities, while others value sector efficiency, competitiveness, and neoliberal individualism (see right side of Figure 1). These conflicting value stances figure in public debates (Pinkerton 1989;Pinkerton and Edwards 2009;Bavington 2010;Pinkerton and Silver 2011;Silver 2013;Barnett and Eakin 2015;Foley, Mather, and Neis 2015), often tangled with the rhetoric of "modernity" and the intersection of local and global normative orders (Swyngedouw 2000;Edwards 2003;Misa 2003;Oseland, Haarstad, and Fløysand 2011;Head and Gibson 2012;Berliner, Legrain, and Van de Port 2013). Examining these debates using ANT and assemblage allows us to explore how the resulting conflict affects human environment relations (see also Barnett, Messenger, and Wiber 2017) and what Delaney (2010, 25) has called the socio-spatio-legal phenomenon of nomospheric strategies.…”