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.
Category: Essays
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.
Climate Crisis Meets Flatland’s Multidimensional Imaginaries
Edwin A. Abbott nineteenth-century novel Flatland is often described as a science (or mathematical) fiction. Valeria Zambianchi argues that it can be read as climate fiction as it shows that the possibilities to combat climate crisis are already present in our world.
The Deep Roots of Plant Time
Yota Batsaki explores the ways Kapwani Kiwanga’s sculpture “On Growth” converges the past and the present, challenging human temporalities through exploration of plant time. The sculpture is on display at the High Line in New York City.
What Time is the Nomad?
Natasha Maru engages with the pastoralist temporalities as experienced by Rabari nomads in Kachchh, India. This narrative ethnographic account highlights the changing rhythms of pastoral lifestyles with shifts in the political economy of the region.
