Race & Ethnicity

Organic Farming's Political History

Organic Farming’s Political History

Organic farming has far-right roots. While the movement has grown beyond those, its history shows why we must examine our theories of social change …
Drawing of people kneeling in pineapple plantation

In Hawaiʻi, Plantation Tourism Tastes Like Pineapple

The Dole pineapple plantation has a destructive history of transforming the Hawaiian Islands. Mallory Huard describes how that continues today in the tourism industry …
Painting of a woman in a row boat, a fish-shaped ship, and a large bird.

Whose Utopia? American Ecofascism Since the 1880s

A 19th-century novel about a (white) women’s utopia at the center of the earth documents the long history of American eugenics and ecofascism …
Food Is Just the Beginning: A Conversation with Monica White

Food Is Just the Beginning: A Conversation with Monica White

Farming has been a part of Black freedom struggles for a long time. It’s always been about much more than growing food …
An illustration of an octopus

Eight Online Environmental Archives to Bookmark

These digital environmental archives offer a range of approaches to environmental histories, cultural practices, and ecological changes …
An old photo from the cover of Letters to Memory depicting two young girls in pink dresses and palm trees in the background.

What Counts as Environmental Storytelling: A Conversation with Karen Tei Yamashita

The award-winning author and Professor Emeritus of Literature and Creative Writing discusses storytelling during environmental crisis, legacies of Japanese incarceration, and why ethnographies are environmental writing …
A hand holds a fern leaf at the base of it

Recommended Readings for a Radical Life

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Cleo Woelfle-Erskine, and other activists and educators recommend books that challenge the divisions of life drawn by settler colonialism, racial slavery, and the natural sciences …
A street lined with tents and palm trees

Plantation Housing Isn’t the Answer to Homelessness in Hawaiʻi

A “plantation-style community” might ease houselessness in Hawaiʻi. But it also erases violent histories of labor exploitation and Native dispossession. Leanne Day and Rebecca Hogue discuss Kahauiki Village and the dangers of plantation nostalgia …
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 …
Small conical red clay sculptures in a wooded lot.

How the Soil Remembers Plantation Slavery

What haunts the land? Artists R.L. Martens and Bii Robertson dig up the tangled history of “the vampire crop,” slavery, and soil exhaustion in Maryland, revealing that the past is more present than you might think …
A sculpture depicting a police officer with a dog on a leash, as the dog attacks a man who is falling backwards

Why Animal Studies Must Be Antiracist: A Conversation with Bénédicte Boisseron

A new book, Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question, moves beyond familiar comparisons between race and species by drawing on Black studies …
Coal worker at Heart Mountain Relocation Center, Wyoming

The WWII Incarceration of Japanese Americans Is an Environmental Story

The environmental conditions of Japanese American incarceration camps in World War II were pivotal to the way detainees navigated their experience. But these histories are as diverse as their landscapes …