Category: Essays

An clear-cut field with muddy ground used for monocropping, some trees in the distance.

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.

A black rhino stands alone in a grassland savannah

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.

Various documents and a black and white polaroid sit on a counter, each has visible burning around the edges.

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.

A sculpture with two long mosaic pieces of browns, grays, and blacks reaches toward the sky. The sculpture is surrounded by a ring of rust-colored rocks.

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.