Troubling Dualisms with the God in the Aquarium
God, pet, and research subject, axolotls transgress Western dualisms. Alex Ventimilla explores what these creatures tell us about science, companionship, and life in the Anthropocene.
Play Nature in These Six (More) Board Games
Nate Carlin is back to review six (more) nature-themed board games: the worlds they construct and the ecological stories they tell.
What Comes After Earth Day?
In this special episode, Edge Effects and the SustainUW Podcast team collaborate to discuss the history of Earth Day in the United States, bring a glimpse of Earth Fest celebrations on UW-Madison’s campus, and underline the importance of embracing environmental protection beyond just April 22.
Carp as Villains and Victims
Teri Harman considers resilience, fishy companionship, and the culpability of “invasive” carp in Utah Lake. Are carp villains or victims?
A Cage of One’s Own? On Interspecies Captive-ation
Using the concept of captivation, Quinn Georgic unpacks human-animal interspecies relations by looking closely at mutual power that binds humans and primates together—from HBO’s CHIMP CRAZY to fieldwork with lemurs.
Kelp Can Help Build More Just Futures
Lydia Lapporte traces how the project of kelp recovery in the Pacific Ocean connects to the mission of decarceration. Relational companionship and abolition ecologies can be useful for both kelp and incarcerated people.
Consensual AI? A Call for Indigenous-Led Caribou Conservation
Genevieve Pfeiffer explores human-caribou entanglements and how Indigenous relationships with them could guide future conservation efforts—avoiding past disasters like the James Bay Project.
My Strange Kinship with a Tick
What messages are shared through a tick bite? Maxime Fecteau explores his experience with Lyme disease, revealing how an undesired relationship with ticks nonetheless has profound impact on his way of seeing ecological degradation, multispecies kinship, and the Anthropocene.
Beastly Consent and Relationships Beyond Boundaries
Vita Sleigh investigates the connections between animal consent, interspecies erotics, and the (at times violent) power differentials that characterize commonly experienced relationships with animals. How can we attend to the otherness of creatures and hold our attractions to them with care?
Who Gets to Be Alive? On Rivers and People
In reviewing Robert Macfarlane’s forthcoming book IS A RIVER ALIVE?, Anna Christensen Spydell connects the colonial mistreatment and dehumanization of Indigenous and immigrant “Others” to the pollution and objectification of rivers around the world.