What Lichens Teach Us About the Air We Breathe
What can we learn from lichens about the air we breathe? Lucy Sabin shares her creative research on sensing atmospheres with lichens as proxies.
Category: Essays
Seance, Queer Climate Activism, and the Radical Faeries
Could seance be more than just a party trick? Sam Bean, Alison Schultz, Carmen Warner, and Barbara Leckie unpack its overlooked political history, including how the queer group Radical Faeries used seances to articulate an egalitarian, environmentally-connected identity.
Architectural Flows of Settler Colonialism and Resistance
Anamika Singh reveals the multi-faceted, longstanding connections between settler colonialism, the ongoing war in Palestine, and the university as both an institutional agent of occupation and a site of resistance.
Does the U.S. Have a Fire Problem?
Richard Bednarski connects the forest fires of 1910 to the subsequent media-driven age of fire exclusion policy, despite scientific evidence for fire inclusion. Did years of this practice worsen the United States’s “fire problem” today?
Mourning Waste in the Anthropocene
Sophie Chao traces how Marind People of West Papua suffer the effects of monoculture toxicity while also mourning for the waste it produces.
Conserving Biodiversity without Preserving Settler Ecologies
Charis Enns & Brock Bersaglio use Laikipia County, Kenya to trace connections between settler colonial power and conservation, offering an “other” way of maintaining biodiversity that prioritizes Indigenous Peoples and their endangered livestock species.
Reforesting Pikirangi, Reckoning with Colonial Histories in Aotearoa/New Zealand
Sadie Rittman explores the history and significance of Pikirangi—a reforestation project—in Aotearoa/New Zealand.
Trilliums as Kin in Victorian Archives
Ellie Kincaid turns to plants as kin through reflections on Victorian herbariums, coming across springtime trilliums, and their own journey of moving to Wisconsin.
Rethinking Rural Resilience in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom
In July 2023, historic floods swept through the state of Vermont. Erin O’Farrell examines the rhetorics of resiliency that emerged after this disaster, arguing for a reconceptualization of the Vermonter identity and resilience itself.
Plant Blindness and “Seeing” Vegetal Timescales
Katherine Cheung examines the concept of plant blindness and the ways in which humans can understand the differing timescales of plants—ultimately attuning themselves to vegetal rhythms.
