The American Recycling Myth
Why do we recycle? American consumers have learned to think of recycling as a local activity, but a recent Chinese ban on imported solid waste may force us to see the ways that recycling is a global industry.
Category: Essays
Zozobra & Me: Performance and Place at the Santa Fe Fiesta
A meditation on how the annual burning of a 51-foot marionette forges connections to a city and its complex, violent past.
From TNT to Tallgrass: Prairie Restoration at a Munitions Plant Turned National Grassland
It was the world’s largest munitions plant. Now it’s a rich grassland teeming with wildflowers, hikers, and even a bison herd. Illinois’s Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie offers an environmental success story for our time.
Bittersweet Catch: Korea’s Diving Women and the Pitfalls of Cultural Preservation
While attending a school set up to train the next generation of haenyeo divers, one woman grapples with the historical and ongoing complexities of maintaining the traditional practice.
Knowing Prairies: An Essay in Comic Form
What can the world’s first restored prairie tell us about living with the land? The University of Wisconsin–Madison Arboretum inspires one artist to reflect on ecological restoration and what we call nature.
The Land Ethic Revisited: Individualism vs. Morality
How can a community implement Aldo Leopold’s notion of the land ethic? Kenya’s Njuri Ncheke councils offer an example, balancing individual and group agency.
Why We Don’t Like Wild Women
In American popular culture, from the colonial era to the present, women who venture out into wild places cannot escape the strictures of gender.
Remembering Lost Landscapes in Cambodia
Nearly forty years after the Pol Pot time, Cambodia’s landscape testifies to a tumultuous past and hints at an uncertain environmental future.
Crying Dugongs and Ocean Encounters in Southeast Asia
Stories of the dugong, a cousin of the manatee, offer important insight into human-nature encounters in the waters of Southeast Asia.
Loaves and Fishes at Standing Rock
A senior scholar of North American indigenous history visits the Oceti Sakowin camp and finds cause for hope. Up to a point.
