Eric Nost
Biographic Data
| ID | 761795 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Eric Nost |
| GIVEN NAMES | Eric |
| FAMILY NAME | Nost |
| SIGNATURE | NOST E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Guelph |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9320-072X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 223 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Exploring more‐than‐human ethics and the digital dimensions of nature recovery through an interactive fiction game
This perspective piece considers how a more‐than‐human approach to ethics can foster nuanced, critical understandings of the digital dimensions of nature recovery. A more‐than‐human approach expands on who or what is included as ethical actors while focusing on the interconnectedness of human and nonhuman experiences. First, we discuss what more‐than‐human ethics involve, the opportunities they provide for analysis and practice, as well as what l…
Surplus environments of the digital hinterlands
Digital capitalism reconfigures socio-ecological networks, producing landscapes that serve it in the extraction of rents and circulation of value. These include connections stretching between urban cores and subordinated ‘hinterlands’ that supply digital growth machines with physical resources, cultural material, and informational inputs. I review some of the political ecological conditions wrought by these uneven networks, finding that the notio…
Unmuting the message: Climate communication in a complex world
Follow the Thing: Digital Natures
The gamification of animal movement data—as in exercise apps that enable users to run against GPS-tracked elephants—is a form of digital nature (Nelson et al. 2022; Turnbull et al. 2022; Luque-Ayala et al. 2024). More than games and animal movement, digital nature most broadly refers to the construction and virtualisation of humans and non-humans through a wide variety of digital technologies, including, as Nature 2.0, social media (Büscher 2013)…
Infrastructuring Care: Co-Designing Computational Notebooks for Environmental Data Justice
The 2016 election of Donald Trump heightened the disproportionate risks from toxicants faced by minoritized communities from cuts in the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) funding, reworking environmental health regulations, and obfuscating related information. In response, the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI)-a US-based network of social scientists, technologists, and activists-was formed to develop an environmental data…
Digital natures: New ontologies, new politics
Digital tools and practices are transforming societal relationships with non-human worlds—whether through smartphone apps that city dwellers use to navigate urban forests, robotic bees that pollinate crops, or webcams that livestream rare birds' nests. Recent academic and popular interest in the coming together of digital and natural worlds has generated both creative and critical reflections on what the digital means for the very concept of natu…
Governing AI, governing climate change
Those concerned with climate governance will want to keep watching what is happening in AI governance. Far from unrelated, the two parallel one another in terms of how fractions of capital—whether within fossil fuel or tech sectors—call for legislating in the face of crisis or for voluntary pledges. In truth, both may be said to be forms of self‐governance. Climate and AI intersect firstly in how they are imagined: dominant climate and AI discour…
What Does Chelsea Creek Do for You? A Relational Approach to Environmental Justice Communication
Historically, academic and government environmental justice (EJ) research and communication efforts have centered on quantifying, mapping, and visualizing the environmental harms faced by EJ communities (communities facing disproportionate levels of environmental harm). Unangax Education scholar Eve Tuck critiques such frameworks as “damage-centered” because they cast entire communities—predominantly low-income, BIPOC communities—as lacking or le…
Is adaptation planning effective and for whom? The case of Louisiana’s 2017 Comprehensive Master Plan for a Sustainable Coast
Flooding in the United States impacts over 40 million people, disproportionately affecting low-income and non-white communities, while costing at least $8 billion annually. Large scale response-based plans have become popular adaptation tools; however, there are limited analyses of their effectiveness and equity. The State of Louisiana’s 2017 Comprehensive Master Plan for a Sustainable Coast outlines billions of dollars worth of investments into …
Making global oceans governance in/visible with Smart Earth: The case of Global Fishing Watch
The number and variety of technologies used for environmental surveillance is expanding rapidly, making constant data collection and near 'real time' analyses possible. 'Smart Earth' describes networked infrastructures comprised of devices and equipment and signals to the human dimensions inherent to developing, deploying and putting technology and large datasets to use. In this paper, we situate Smart Earth in terms of technological products and…
The tool didn’t make decisions for us: Metrics and the performance of accountability in environmental governance
Governments use metrics made possible by new data technologies to allocate budgets, manage pandemics, valorize ecosystems, and demonstrate how these actions are legitimate. Big data is pointed to as providing objective answers that emerge untampered from observations of the world as it is – a view from nowhere. While data is more valued than ever in environmental governance, so too are arrangements that seek stakeholders’ input and otherwise addr…
Earth for AI: A Political Ecology of Data-Driven Climate Initiatives
Short-term rentals as digitally-mediated tourism gentrification: Impacts on housing in New Orleans
The ways in which short-term rental (STR) companies like Airbnb re-spatialize tourism are becoming apparent and force a reconsideration of "tourism gentrification" studies. Research on this phenomenon, originally described in New Orleans fifteen years ago, has traditionally focused on the role of the state and corporate interests investing large amounts of capital to promote mass tourism. Drawing on Census data and a dataset of STR listings in Ne…
Infrastructuring "data-driven" environmental governance in Louisiana's coastal restoration plan
Conservationists around the world advocate for "data-driven" environmental governance, expecting data infrastructures to make all relevant and actionable information readily available. But how exactly is data to be infrastructured and to what political effect? I show how putting together and maintaining environmental data for decision-making is not a straightforward technical task, but a practice shaped by and shaping politico-economic context. D…
A political ecology of data
Conservationists, governments, and corporations see promise in digital technologies to provide holistic, rapid, and objective information to inform policy, shape investments, and monitor ecosystems. But it is increasingly clear that environmental data does more than simply offer a better view of the planet. This special issue makes a single overarching argument: that we cannot fully understand the current conjuncture in global environmental gover…
Thinking algorithmically: The making of hegemonic knowledge in climate governance
Algorithms – instructions for acting on data, executed by code – are increasingly being enrolled into climate policy governance via the prediction of policy outcomes, the evaluation of climate mitigation and adaptation strategies, and the design of practitioner actions. Yet the political implications of these technological changes in environmental governance are only just beginning to be theorised. In this paper, we examine one particular facet o…
New but for whom? Discourses of innovation in precision agriculture
Learning in Crisis: Training Students to Monitor and Address Irresponsible Knowledge Construction by US Federal Agencies under Trump
Immediately after President Trump’s inauguration, US federal science agencies began deleting information about climate change from their websites, triggering alarm among scientists, environmental activists, and journalists about the administration’s attempt to suppress information about climate change and promulgate climate denialism. The Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) was founded in late 2016 to build a multidisciplinary colla…
Linking model design and application for transdisciplinary approaches in social-ecological systems
Improving spatial decision making using interactive maps: An empirical study on interface complexity and decision complexity in the North American hazardous waste trade
Spatial decisions increasingly are made by both professional and citizen stakeholders using interactive maps, yet few empirically-derived guidelines exist for designing interactive maps that support complex reasoning and decision making across problem contexts. We address this gap through an online map study with 122 participants with varying expertise. The study required participants to assume two hypothetical scenarios in the North American haz…
Q-method and the performance of subjectivity: Reflections from a survey of US stream restoration practitioners
Practicing environmental data justice: From DataRescue to Data Together
The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative ( EDGI ) formed in response to the 2016 US elections and the resulting political shifts which created widespread public concern about the future integrity of US environmental agencies and policy. As a distributed, consensus‐based organisation, EDGI has worked to document, contextualise, and analyse changes to environmental data and governance practices in the US . One project EDGI has undertaken is…
Hazardous Aesthetics: A “Merely Interesting” Toxic Tour of Waste Management Data
This illustrated essay attempts to respond to the slow violence of the hazardous waste trade. We introduce and analyze common representational styles of hazardous waste: greenwashing, ruin porn, environmental justice toxic tours, and Ngai’s concept of the merely interesting. We argue that the first two styles tend to reproduce the status quo, but that the latter two are potentially more disruptive. We then turn to a data set about the transnation…
Undermining methodological nationalism: Cosmopolitan analysis and visualization of the North American hazardous waste trade
Drawing on a novel dataset of hazardous waste shipments among Canada, Mexico, and the United States, we seek to enhance dominant modes of understanding transnational trading and regulation at the scale of the nation-state. We argue that these, while valuable, are limited by methodological nationalism. This epistemological position identifies the nation-state as the most relevant unit of analysis in examining "transnational" phenomena. In the case…
HazMatMapper: An online and interactive geographic visualization tool for exploring transnational flows of hazardous waste and environmental justice
HazMatMapper is an online and interactive geographic visualization tool designed to facilitate exploration of transnational flows of hazardous waste in North America (http://geography.wisc.edu/hazardouswaste/map/). While conventional narratives suggest that wealthier countries such as Canada and the United States (US) export waste to poorer countries like Mexico, little is known about how waste trading may affect specific sites within any of the …
Thinking algorithmically: The making of hegemonic knowledge in climate governance
Algorithms – instructions for acting on data, executed by code – are increasingly being enrolled into climate policy governance via the prediction of policy outcomes, the evaluation of climate mitigation and adaptation strategies, and the design of practitioner actions. Yet the political implications of these technological changes in environmental governance are only just beginning to be theorised. In this paper, we examine one particular facet o…
A political ecology of data
Conservationists, governments, and corporations see promise in digital technologies to provide holistic, rapid, and objective information to inform policy, shape investments, and monitor ecosystems. But it is increasingly clear that environmental data does more than simply offer a better view of the planet. This special issue makes a single overarching argument: that we cannot fully understand the current conjuncture in global environmental gover…
New but for whom? Discourses of innovation in precision agriculture
Earth for AI: A Political Ecology of Data-Driven Climate Initiatives
Short-term rentals as digitally-mediated tourism gentrification: Impacts on housing in New Orleans
The ways in which short-term rental (STR) companies like Airbnb re-spatialize tourism are becoming apparent and force a reconsideration of "tourism gentrification" studies. Research on this phenomenon, originally described in New Orleans fifteen years ago, has traditionally focused on the role of the state and corporate interests investing large amounts of capital to promote mass tourism. Drawing on Census data and a dataset of STR listings in Ne…
Performing nature's value: Software and the making of Oregon's ecosystem services markets
Geographers of technology illustrate software code's contexts, effects, and agencies as they shape urban space and everyday life, but the consequences of code for nature remain understudied. Political ecologists have critiqued remote sensing and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) based conservation projects, but have not engaged more broadly with the role of software in the contested production, circulation, and application of ecological knowle…
Hazardous Aesthetics: A “Merely Interesting” Toxic Tour of Waste Management Data
This illustrated essay attempts to respond to the slow violence of the hazardous waste trade. We introduce and analyze common representational styles of hazardous waste: greenwashing, ruin porn, environmental justice toxic tours, and Ngai’s concept of the merely interesting. We argue that the first two styles tend to reproduce the status quo, but that the latter two are potentially more disruptive. We then turn to a data set about the transnation…
Undisciplining environmental justice research with visual storytelling
Q-method and the performance of subjectivity: Reflections from a survey of US stream restoration practitioners
Practicing environmental data justice: From DataRescue to Data Together
The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative ( EDGI ) formed in response to the 2016 US elections and the resulting political shifts which created widespread public concern about the future integrity of US environmental agencies and policy. As a distributed, consensus‐based organisation, EDGI has worked to document, contextualise, and analyse changes to environmental data and governance practices in the US . One project EDGI has undertaken is…
The Power of Place: Tourism Development in Costa Rica
In this paper, I question how representations of tourist destinations color and are colored by development. Presenting the results of ethnographic fieldwork conducted on the southern Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, I find that the authenticity of portrayals of place is important not for its veracity, but for the social work it performs. Authenticity is not merely socially constructed but expressive of social relations which value people and places…
The tool didn’t make decisions for us: Metrics and the performance of accountability in environmental governance
Governments use metrics made possible by new data technologies to allocate budgets, manage pandemics, valorize ecosystems, and demonstrate how these actions are legitimate. Big data is pointed to as providing objective answers that emerge untampered from observations of the world as it is – a view from nowhere. While data is more valued than ever in environmental governance, so too are arrangements that seek stakeholders’ input and otherwise addr…
Digital natures: New ontologies, new politics
Digital tools and practices are transforming societal relationships with non-human worlds—whether through smartphone apps that city dwellers use to navigate urban forests, robotic bees that pollinate crops, or webcams that livestream rare birds' nests. Recent academic and popular interest in the coming together of digital and natural worlds has generated both creative and critical reflections on what the digital means for the very concept of natu…
Infrastructuring "data-driven" environmental governance in Louisiana's coastal restoration plan
Conservationists around the world advocate for "data-driven" environmental governance, expecting data infrastructures to make all relevant and actionable information readily available. But how exactly is data to be infrastructured and to what political effect? I show how putting together and maintaining environmental data for decision-making is not a straightforward technical task, but a practice shaped by and shaping politico-economic context. D…
Whose geography? Which publics
In this response, the members of a professional development graduate seminar at the University of Kentucky reflect on key implications and questions which arose from our reading of the Kitchin et al. (2013) paper. We found the paper very relevant to our situation as potential entrants to the academic labor market, and to practices of knowledge production and dissemination that we already face. We highlight the following three inter-related points…
Making global oceans governance in/visible with Smart Earth: The case of Global Fishing Watch
The number and variety of technologies used for environmental surveillance is expanding rapidly, making constant data collection and near 'real time' analyses possible. 'Smart Earth' describes networked infrastructures comprised of devices and equipment and signals to the human dimensions inherent to developing, deploying and putting technology and large datasets to use. In this paper, we situate Smart Earth in terms of technological products and…
Linking model design and application for transdisciplinary approaches in social-ecological systems
Undermining methodological nationalism: Cosmopolitan analysis and visualization of the North American hazardous waste trade
Drawing on a novel dataset of hazardous waste shipments among Canada, Mexico, and the United States, we seek to enhance dominant modes of understanding transnational trading and regulation at the scale of the nation-state. We argue that these, while valuable, are limited by methodological nationalism. This epistemological position identifies the nation-state as the most relevant unit of analysis in examining "transnational" phenomena. In the case…
Governing AI, governing climate change
Those concerned with climate governance will want to keep watching what is happening in AI governance. Far from unrelated, the two parallel one another in terms of how fractions of capital—whether within fossil fuel or tech sectors—call for legislating in the face of crisis or for voluntary pledges. In truth, both may be said to be forms of self‐governance. Climate and AI intersect firstly in how they are imagined: dominant climate and AI discour…
Is adaptation planning effective and for whom? The case of Louisiana’s 2017 Comprehensive Master Plan for a Sustainable Coast
Flooding in the United States impacts over 40 million people, disproportionately affecting low-income and non-white communities, while costing at least $8 billion annually. Large scale response-based plans have become popular adaptation tools; however, there are limited analyses of their effectiveness and equity. The State of Louisiana’s 2017 Comprehensive Master Plan for a Sustainable Coast outlines billions of dollars worth of investments into …
Whose geography? Which publics
In this response, the members of a professional development graduate seminar at the University of Kentucky reflect on key implications and questions which arose from our reading of the Kitchin et al. (2013) paper. We found the paper very relevant to our situation as potential entrants to the academic labor market, and to practices of knowledge production and dissemination that we already face. We highlight the following three inter-related points…
The Power of Place: Tourism Development in Costa Rica
In this paper, I question how representations of tourist destinations color and are colored by development. Presenting the results of ethnographic fieldwork conducted on the southern Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, I find that the authenticity of portrayals of place is important not for its veracity, but for the social work it performs. Authenticity is not merely socially constructed but expressive of social relations which value people and places…
Performing nature's value: Software and the making of Oregon's ecosystem services markets
Geographers of technology illustrate software code's contexts, effects, and agencies as they shape urban space and everyday life, but the consequences of code for nature remain understudied. Political ecologists have critiqued remote sensing and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) based conservation projects, but have not engaged more broadly with the role of software in the contested production, circulation, and application of ecological knowle…
HazMatMapper: An online and interactive geographic visualization tool for exploring transnational flows of hazardous waste and environmental justice
HazMatMapper is an online and interactive geographic visualization tool designed to facilitate exploration of transnational flows of hazardous waste in North America (http://geography.wisc.edu/hazardouswaste/map/). While conventional narratives suggest that wealthier countries such as Canada and the United States (US) export waste to poorer countries like Mexico, little is known about how waste trading may affect specific sites within any of the …
Undisciplining environmental justice research with visual storytelling
Practicing environmental data justice: From DataRescue to Data Together
The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative ( EDGI ) formed in response to the 2016 US elections and the resulting political shifts which created widespread public concern about the future integrity of US environmental agencies and policy. As a distributed, consensus‐based organisation, EDGI has worked to document, contextualise, and analyse changes to environmental data and governance practices in the US . One project EDGI has undertaken is…
Hazardous Aesthetics: A “Merely Interesting” Toxic Tour of Waste Management Data
This illustrated essay attempts to respond to the slow violence of the hazardous waste trade. We introduce and analyze common representational styles of hazardous waste: greenwashing, ruin porn, environmental justice toxic tours, and Ngai’s concept of the merely interesting. We argue that the first two styles tend to reproduce the status quo, but that the latter two are potentially more disruptive. We then turn to a data set about the transnation…
Undermining methodological nationalism: Cosmopolitan analysis and visualization of the North American hazardous waste trade
Drawing on a novel dataset of hazardous waste shipments among Canada, Mexico, and the United States, we seek to enhance dominant modes of understanding transnational trading and regulation at the scale of the nation-state. We argue that these, while valuable, are limited by methodological nationalism. This epistemological position identifies the nation-state as the most relevant unit of analysis in examining "transnational" phenomena. In the case…
Improving spatial decision making using interactive maps: An empirical study on interface complexity and decision complexity in the North American hazardous waste trade
Spatial decisions increasingly are made by both professional and citizen stakeholders using interactive maps, yet few empirically-derived guidelines exist for designing interactive maps that support complex reasoning and decision making across problem contexts. We address this gap through an online map study with 122 participants with varying expertise. The study required participants to assume two hypothetical scenarios in the North American haz…
Q-method and the performance of subjectivity: Reflections from a survey of US stream restoration practitioners
Learning in Crisis: Training Students to Monitor and Address Irresponsible Knowledge Construction by US Federal Agencies under Trump
Immediately after President Trump’s inauguration, US federal science agencies began deleting information about climate change from their websites, triggering alarm among scientists, environmental activists, and journalists about the administration’s attempt to suppress information about climate change and promulgate climate denialism. The Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) was founded in late 2016 to build a multidisciplinary colla…
Linking model design and application for transdisciplinary approaches in social-ecological systems
Thinking algorithmically: The making of hegemonic knowledge in climate governance
Algorithms – instructions for acting on data, executed by code – are increasingly being enrolled into climate policy governance via the prediction of policy outcomes, the evaluation of climate mitigation and adaptation strategies, and the design of practitioner actions. Yet the political implications of these technological changes in environmental governance are only just beginning to be theorised. In this paper, we examine one particular facet o…
New but for whom? Discourses of innovation in precision agriculture
The tool didn’t make decisions for us: Metrics and the performance of accountability in environmental governance
Governments use metrics made possible by new data technologies to allocate budgets, manage pandemics, valorize ecosystems, and demonstrate how these actions are legitimate. Big data is pointed to as providing objective answers that emerge untampered from observations of the world as it is – a view from nowhere. While data is more valued than ever in environmental governance, so too are arrangements that seek stakeholders’ input and otherwise addr…
Earth for AI: A Political Ecology of Data-Driven Climate Initiatives
Short-term rentals as digitally-mediated tourism gentrification: Impacts on housing in New Orleans
The ways in which short-term rental (STR) companies like Airbnb re-spatialize tourism are becoming apparent and force a reconsideration of "tourism gentrification" studies. Research on this phenomenon, originally described in New Orleans fifteen years ago, has traditionally focused on the role of the state and corporate interests investing large amounts of capital to promote mass tourism. Drawing on Census data and a dataset of STR listings in Ne…
Infrastructuring "data-driven" environmental governance in Louisiana's coastal restoration plan
Conservationists around the world advocate for "data-driven" environmental governance, expecting data infrastructures to make all relevant and actionable information readily available. But how exactly is data to be infrastructured and to what political effect? I show how putting together and maintaining environmental data for decision-making is not a straightforward technical task, but a practice shaped by and shaping politico-economic context. D…
A political ecology of data
Conservationists, governments, and corporations see promise in digital technologies to provide holistic, rapid, and objective information to inform policy, shape investments, and monitor ecosystems. But it is increasingly clear that environmental data does more than simply offer a better view of the planet. This special issue makes a single overarching argument: that we cannot fully understand the current conjuncture in global environmental gover…
What Does Chelsea Creek Do for You? A Relational Approach to Environmental Justice Communication
Historically, academic and government environmental justice (EJ) research and communication efforts have centered on quantifying, mapping, and visualizing the environmental harms faced by EJ communities (communities facing disproportionate levels of environmental harm). Unangax Education scholar Eve Tuck critiques such frameworks as “damage-centered” because they cast entire communities—predominantly low-income, BIPOC communities—as lacking or le…
Is adaptation planning effective and for whom? The case of Louisiana’s 2017 Comprehensive Master Plan for a Sustainable Coast
Flooding in the United States impacts over 40 million people, disproportionately affecting low-income and non-white communities, while costing at least $8 billion annually. Large scale response-based plans have become popular adaptation tools; however, there are limited analyses of their effectiveness and equity. The State of Louisiana’s 2017 Comprehensive Master Plan for a Sustainable Coast outlines billions of dollars worth of investments into …
Making global oceans governance in/visible with Smart Earth: The case of Global Fishing Watch
The number and variety of technologies used for environmental surveillance is expanding rapidly, making constant data collection and near 'real time' analyses possible. 'Smart Earth' describes networked infrastructures comprised of devices and equipment and signals to the human dimensions inherent to developing, deploying and putting technology and large datasets to use. In this paper, we situate Smart Earth in terms of technological products and…
Digital natures: New ontologies, new politics
Digital tools and practices are transforming societal relationships with non-human worlds—whether through smartphone apps that city dwellers use to navigate urban forests, robotic bees that pollinate crops, or webcams that livestream rare birds' nests. Recent academic and popular interest in the coming together of digital and natural worlds has generated both creative and critical reflections on what the digital means for the very concept of natu…
Governing AI, governing climate change
Those concerned with climate governance will want to keep watching what is happening in AI governance. Far from unrelated, the two parallel one another in terms of how fractions of capital—whether within fossil fuel or tech sectors—call for legislating in the face of crisis or for voluntary pledges. In truth, both may be said to be forms of self‐governance. Climate and AI intersect firstly in how they are imagined: dominant climate and AI discour…
Unmuting the message: Climate communication in a complex world
Political science (20 works) · Computer Science (17 works) · Law (16 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Economics (11 works) · Politics (10 works) · Business (9 works) · Engineering (8 works) · Environmental justice (8 works) · Environmental resource management (8 works)