Henrik Selin - Mercury Stories: Understanding Sustainability through a Volatile Element

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 Linkping 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 Bjrn-Ola Linnr for graciously hosting our stay at Linkping 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 Universitys 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 20182021, 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 MITs 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 Henriks 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.