Subhankar Banerjee

Subhankar Banerjee works closely with Indigenous Gwich’in and Iñupiat community members and environmental organizations to protect significant biological nurseries in Arctic Alaska. Author of "Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Seasons of Life and Land" (Mountaineers Books, 2003), and editor of "Arctic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point" (Seven Stories Press, 2013), Subhankar is currently completing two books: coeditor (with T.J. Demos and Emily Eliza Scott) of "Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture and Climate Change" (Routledge, Spring 2021), and coauthor (with Ananda Banerjee) of "Biological Annihilation" (Seven Stories Press, Spring 2022). Subhankar serves as the founding Director of the Species in Peril project at UNM.
Articles by this author
Views Friday, March 02, 2012 How “Drill, Baby, Drill” and “Yes We Can” Got Married American military prefers to make preemptive strikes. We know this. In America, corporations have enormous influence over the government—these days they essentially run the government. We know this too. And now a giant corporation has made a preemptive strike against nonprofit organizations. “Arctic Ocean drilling: Shell launches preemptive legal strike” is the title of a recent Los Angeles Times article . Read more |
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Views Thursday, February 23, 2012 How the New Mexico Anti–Nuclear Campaign Achieved A Major Victory On February 17, as I was stepping out the door for an exhibition opening of my arctic photographs and to participate in an environmental panel at Fordham University with former New York State assistant attorney general Robert Emmet Hernan, I received an email news update from Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety, a Santa Fe, New Mexico based NGO that began with these words, “We have reason to celebrate with the ‘abandonment’ of the proposed Nuclear Facility Read more |
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Views Monday, August 15, 2011 BPing the Arctic, Again — Fast Tracking Shell’s Dangerous Drilling One of the riskiest and most destructive extreme energy oil exploration projects on the planet is moving toward implementation without scientific understanding or technical preparedness — Shell’s oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean of Alaska. Read more |
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Views Tuesday, July 19, 2011 “Another Kind of Fukushima?” asks Whistleblower Robert Gilkeson No, I didn’t make up the whistleblower title for Registered Geologist Robert (Bob) H. Gilkeson. For his important work on groundwater contamination at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, in 2007 he received the annual “Whistleblower Award” from the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability at a Washington, D.C. reception. Read more |
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Views Friday, July 01, 2011 Las Conchas Fire Woke Us Up—Let Us Now Stop The Plutonium Bomb Factory The Las Conchas Fire in New Mexico is still burning. It is rapidly growing by the day. On June 29, I did a phone interview with Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico and his colleague Scott Kovac; and sit down conversation with Marian Naranjo, a prominent native American elder and activist from the Santa Clara Pueblo and Joni Arends, executive director of Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety. As you’ll see, the Las Conchas Fire has woken us up. Read more |
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Views Tuesday, June 28, 2011 New Mexico Is Burning With Potential For Nuclear Contamination My home state, New Mexico is right now burning dangerously with the Las Conchas Fire. And, we have the potential for nuclear contamination. Here is a report from home. Read more |
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Views Thursday, June 16, 2011 Who Is Tim DeChristopher? Often we focus on a single act—more heroic the act is, more attention we pay. We also focus on a single result—more it tends toward either end of a good–bad spectrum, more attention we pay. Along the way, we skip the journey that led to the act or realize that the result is only a small stop on a long journey. Such is the story of young climate justice activist Tim DeChristopher, who is without a doubt a lighting rod of his generation. Read more |
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Views Friday, March 11, 2011 Tim DeChristopher Showed Us 'We Must Act', Let's Not Let Him Down Exactly a week ago on March 3, young climate change activist Tim DeChristopher was convicted for disrupting oil and gas lease sales on public lands in southern Utah. He is an international celebrity right now. Read more |
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Views Monday, March 07, 2011 India Must Free Binayak Sen Immediately In 1970 Howard Zinn began his now–famous speech “The Problem is Civil Obedience” with these words: “I start from the supposition that the world is topsy–turvy, that things are all wrong, that the wrong people are in jail and the wrong people are out of jail, that the wrong people are in power and the wrong people are out of power, that the wealth is distributed in this country and the world in such a way as not simply to require small reform but to require a Read more |
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Views Monday, February 21, 2011 Earth Activism: What We Don’t Want Recently I watched an old Bollywood classic Sholay during a long flight to India to see my ailing parents. I’ve seen this film before, but this time the familiar macho–masala plot with song–and–dance entertainment helped me think about climate change activism afresh. Retired policeman Thakur Baldev Singh wants to end the tyranny of notorious dacoit Gabbar Singh. Thakur hires two small–time but infamous thieves Jai and Veeru to accomplish his wish. Read more |