Category: Reviews

A wooden bookcase with jars of colorful plastic objects on the shelves

Art for Our Plastic Present

Natalie Wright reviews an exhibit on “Plastic Entanglements” at the Chazen Museum of Art which explores questions of our plastic, synthetic world.

An Instagram post of a glacier, with a caption: Yesterday the #NWProject was in Pond Inlet in Nunavut, learning about the Ikaarvik program, which trains Inuit youth to participate in scientific work and encourages visiting Arctic researchers to engage with the community. Also bearded seals! Narwhals! And $58 12-packs of soda! Please note that my FB live didn’t happen (satellite issues)—communication remains very very difficult in the Arctic (this is my thesis). Photos much compressed to make it possible to post. #nsffunded #changingArctic #Arctic #Nunavut #Climatechange

The Social Media of Polar Exploration

Hester Blum’s new book, The News at the Ends of the Earth, explains why 19th-century newspapers printed on polar expeditions offer a model for communicating in the age of climate crisis.

Greta LaFleur's book discusses the relationship between the natural world and sexuality. This painting depicts a fish skewered on a brach. The branch also holds a blue jay and many smaller purple, red, pink, blue, and yellow birds.

The Environmental Histories of Desire

Greta LaFleur’s new book, The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America, shows how desire was produced in surprising ways alongside taxonomies of plants and racial difference in early British colonial texts.

The two covers of Slobodian and Selcer's books, one a painting of a brown window and the other overlapping circles

Managing the Globe after Empire

New books by Perrin Selcer and Quinn Slobodian show how ideas about the global environment and global economy took shape in response to the end of empire.

A shaggy, brown dog stands on a snowy bridge and looks backward at the camera.

2018 Year in Review

As 2018 draws to a close, our editors reflect on a year of climate crisis and environmental exploitation and consider the urgency of environmental art, activism, and scholarship.