Inheriting the Hill Station
In the former colonial hill station of Darjeeling, claims of belonging reveal the paradoxes of living in a place built for someone else.
Category: Essays
Leopard In A Box
What can a taxidermied leopard teach us about commemorating animals in an age of extinction?
Dwelling with Place: Lorine Niedecker’s Ecopoetics
How can poetry, particularly the “ecopoetics” of Wisconsin poet Lorine Niedecker, help us dwell with our nonhuman places?
Praying for Forgiveness: Religious Ethics of Sustainability in Muslim Indonesia
In the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation, environmental ethics and social critique derive from longstanding Islamic practices such as “praying for forgiveness.”
Materialized Dreams: Boom and Bust in the Cultural Landscape of West Texas
The hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”) boom and an imminent bust in the face of a worldwide oil glut are just the most recent swings in a long history of economic and ecological instability in the mineral-rich Permian basin.
Shifting Gears: Rethinking Bicycling in Wisconsin
From “improved” velocipedes on skis to a Good Roads Movement, the history of bicycling is more surprising and wide-reaching than one might expect.
“It’s Only Whites Who Go There”: On Safari in Uganda
A safari trip inspires wonder at both what is found in a game park and who is not.
Bizarre Beauty… in the Background: Video Game Nature in Final Fantasy XII
Can playing video games encourage gamers to think differently about their relationships to the non-human world? A close study of Final Fantasy XII shows how video games represent nature—and argues for ways they could be improved from an environmentalist standpoint.
Taste of Homes: Food and Familiarity
What are the connections between food, place, and belonging? An attempt to make New York-style cheesecake in France suggests some answers.
The Anthropocene: The Promise and Pitfalls of an Epochal Idea
Has Homo sapiens become a geological actor altering the conditions of life so forcefully that our impacts are being written into the fossil record? If so, what are the implications for how we imagine human history, ethics, power, and responsibility?
