Tapping the Past for California’s Water Future
California’s current drought offers an occasion for rethinking how our relationship to the past can help us confront crisis.
Category: Essays
Death, Burial, and Citizenship
Places of burial allow for public recognition of the dead, but also invoke specific forms of official memory, offering a frame for imagining citizenship.
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.
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.
