Listening to What Trees Have to Say
Trees might have a lot to say, but how can humans hear them? Solvejg Nitzke reviews Valerie Trouet’s new book, “Tree Story: The History of the World Written in Rings.”
Category: Reviews
The Quarantine Garden
Gardening is on the rise as the world quarantines during the COVID-19 pandemic. Anna Muenchrath considers the implications and opportunities of the quarantine garden in her review of The Poetics and Politics of Gardening in Hard Times.
Art for Our Plastic Present
Natalie Wright reviews an exhibit on “Plastic Entanglements” at the Chazen Museum of Art which explores questions of our plastic, synthetic world.
The Social Media of Polar Exploration
Hester Blum’s new book, The News at the Ends of the Earth, explains why 19th-century newspapers printed on polar expeditions offer a model for communicating in the age of climate crisis.
Why Write Beautifully About Climate Crisis?
In a moment of climate crisis and as rising seas threaten human life and habitation, writer Elizabeth Rush teaches the importance of learning to let go.
Finally, a Funny Environmental Film
And it might just be the quirky, queered, Icelandic feminist ecowarrior movie you’ve been waiting for.
The Environmental Histories of Desire
Greta LaFleur’s new book, The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America, shows how desire was produced in surprising ways alongside taxonomies of plants and racial difference in early British colonial texts.
Managing the Globe after Empire
New books by Perrin Selcer and Quinn Slobodian show how ideas about the global environment and global economy took shape in response to the end of empire.
Imagining a Green New Deal Through Climate Fiction
Is the Green New Deal real or science fiction? Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel New York 2140 imagines a flooded world where climate action is unavoidable.
The WWII Incarceration of Japanese Americans Is an Environmental Story
The environmental conditions of Japanese American incarceration camps in World War II were pivotal to the way detainees navigated their experience. But these histories are as diverse as their landscapes.
