For the past five years, a history professor has been working with a community in Guatemala to ensure that its water supply is safe. Recently, he received a national grant to continue this work.
The Science and Technology Studies program of the National Science Foundation awarded Nick Copeland, an anthropologist in Virginia Tech’s history department, a $360,000 grant for the project “Participatory Water Science and Resistance to Extractivism.”
Collaborations began in 2018, when Copeland met with community organizations that were concerned that the Escobal silver mine was polluting the regional water system. The team discovered elevated arsenic levels in surface waters near the mine and although team members could not determine that these were caused by the mine, they did find that that a water treatment plant was not removing arsenic from the water.
Since then, Copeland and his…
