The Firelight Group Powerful and Unruly:  Ebola, Oil Sands, and Community-Based Standards in Environmental and Human Health

What happens when a disease like ebola doesn't act like the experts and funders say it's supposed to?

What happens when impacts from big oil sand companies are supposed to stay put, but don't?

Regulation is a process of getting some things to stick while letting other things slip by. This talk will trace what happens when powerful actors are also unruly ones, and how local communities sometimes mobilize locally defined standards and thresholds to identify and challenge ‘leakage’ from very powerful black boxes. Ebola and post-ebola in Sierra Leone, and environmental health and contaminants in the Athabasca delta of northern Alberta are very different places and situations, but both show how powerful and unruly actors can quietly extend themselves into lives and landscapes through contagion or contamination, and how standards can help us see or make us blind, protect us from disease, or make us more vulnerable to it. In these kinds of circumstances, simple community-based standards and thresholds rooted in locally driven surveillance, community based monitoring, and local experience can - and should - play a powerful corrective tool to augment, calibrate and challenge  'big data' technoscience and improve environmental and human health.