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.
Category: Essays
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.
Archives, Aldo Leopold, and an Age of Fire
Dylan Couch traces the complex connections between Aldo Leopold’s conservation land ethic, worsening wildfire risk, and archival precarity that threatens not only living and physical things, but collective memory.
“Buying Time,” and Other Charismatic Temporalities of Climate Change
Mark Carey explores the themes of out of time, accelerating time, and buying time in current climate change discourse, arguing that they flatten other social constructions of time and perpetuate empty “scientific” solutions.
Navigating Eco-Grief with Ancestral Grieving Practices
Eco-grief can feel isolating, but Guevara Han and Rae Jing Han draw on Filipino and Chinese ancestral practices to develop collective grieving practices.
Memorializing Wildfire at the Playground
Jessica George interrogates the politics of seemingly apolitical wildfire memorials and examines how climate change-related art challenge the timelessness of conventional monuments.
