Mercury is a slippery substance. It is difficult to control in its physical form; it is also an analytical and practical challenge to examine more than 8,000 years of human interactions with this elusive compound. In writing this book, we were fortunate to be able to draw on the support of many colleagues whose suggestions and comments greatly helped us in our efforts to trace the often surprising flows of quicksilver and its many impacts on the environment and human well-being through time and across all regions of the world.
Both of us, individually and together, have worked on mercury for more than 15 years, but we wrote much of this book while we were on sabbatical from Boston University and MIT, respectively, in 2018. We visited the Department of Thematic Studies, Environmental Change, at Linköping University in Sweden in spring 2018, fostering engaging and useful discussions on our analytical framework and issues of sustainability transitions and transformations, often over fika. We especially thank Björn-Ola Linnér for graciously hosting our stay at Linköping University, and for his insightful comments on early drafts, along with those of Olof Hjelm, Mattias Hjerpe, Julie Wilk, Henrik Kylin, and Joy Routh. Noelle also spent time at Stockholm University’s Department of Analytical Chemistry and Environmental Sciences as a visiting professor while we were in Sweden, and thanks Matt MacLeod and colleagues for helpful discussions of chemical pollution and mercury science.
Our work on the book manuscript was greatly facilitated by our stay at the Bavarian School of Public Policy at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) as Hans Fischer Senior Fellows for 2018–2021, including during fall 2018 and summer 2019. As part of our appointment as Hans Fischer Senior Fellows, we acknowledge the support of the TUM Institute for Advanced Study. The fellowship program is funded by the German Excellence Initiative and the European Union Seventh Framework Programme under grant agreement #291763. We particularly thank our TUM faculty host Miranda Schreurs for her friendly welcome to Munich, for generously including us in her large and dynamic research group during our stays in Bavaria, for her thoughtful comments, and for organizing helpful discussions and seminars. Visits to local biergartens (mostly) helped advance our thinking and analysis.
We thank MIT’s Policy Lab at the Center for International Studies for supporting our efforts to connect science and policy in the context of mercury governance, which we built on while researching and writing this book. We thank Dan Pomeroy for his expert policy knowledge and assistance through the Policy Lab. The Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University provided critical resources for Henrik’s research and outreach at negotiations of the Minamata Convention on Mercury. Center Director Tony Janetos offered much valuable support and encouragement for this project, including reading and commenting on an early draft of our analytical framework. Sadly, Tony passed away in summer 2019, and his caring and sharp insights are sorely missed at Boston University and beyond.
During the later stages of the book project, we received grant support from the US National Science Foundation, Dynamics of Integrated Socio-Environmental Systems (CNH2) program, under award #1924148. This grant assisted us in finalizing our analytical framework as well as the chapter on artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM). It has also allowed us to expand our collaborations with Ruth Goldstein at University of Wisconsin–Madison, and to further analyze issues of ASGM and sustainability, with a focus on Peru. Particular thanks are due to Steven Barrett at MIT, the MIT Center for Global Change Science, and the Boston University Global Development Policy Center for helping with the grant application to make this continuing support possible.
This book on mercury combines perspectives from a range of different disciplines and analytical approaches. We were highly fortunate to have been able to draw on many of our colleagues who are experts on different aspects of the mercury issue, who read and commented on drafts of individual chapters. Special thanks go to Amanda Giang, Kathleen Mulvaney, Hélène Angot, Ruth Goldstein, Ken Davis, Susan Keane, and Celia Chen. Ken Davis is further responsible for (guilty of?) alerting us to the use of mercury in “Thunderclappers,” which we discuss in chapter 4. We express our apologies to Warner Brothers for borrowing from films in the Matrix franchise for our chapter title and section headings in chapter 8.
We presented earlier versions of individual chapters at the International Studies Association (ISA) annual conference in San Francisco, California, in April 2018, and at the Earth System Governance meeting in Utrecht, the Netherlands, in October 2018. We particularly thank Pam Chasek for her extensive comments as panel discussant at ISA. We also thank all those who provided helpful comments during seminars at Linköping University; the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala; the Technical University of Munich; the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich; and the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Potsdam, Germany.
We thank three anonymous peer reviewers for their comments and suggestions on both the initial book proposal and the first full draft of the book. We give special thanks to Pia Kohler, Leah Stokes, and Stacy VanDeveer for taking time to read through our text and for providing critical comments on the main arguments and the structure of the book, as we were revising the full manuscript. We further acknowledge Beth Clevenger at MIT Press for her support through the writing and publication process, and Virginia Crossman and Mary Bagg for their detailed and valuable assistance with copyediting.
A particular thank you goes to Bill Clark, whose extensive and incisive comments on multiple iterations of the text helped us to sharpen our arguments and better address a broader academic community interested in sustainability science. We benefited from and enjoyed wide-ranging and thought-provoking discussions on mercury and sustainability with Bill in Cambridge as well as in Munich, and we look forward to many more discussions in the future (preferably over more good food and wine, and with cheese served at the appropriate temperature, of course).
At this point in the acknowledgments section, it is typical to thank one’s spouse for their support and encouragement. Many such acknowledgments reveal contributions to the research and writing process as well as manuscript preparation that ought to have been credited with coauthorship. We are, however, married to each other. We thus each thank our spouse for her/his contributions to typing, editing, and analysis during this book project. Accordingly, for any remaining errors, we blame each other.