Rebecca Laurent talks with Jim Endersby about his new book: The Arrival of the Fittest: Biology’s Imaginary Futures, 1900-1935. They discuss how a failed scientific theory inspired public optimism for science, plants, and American imperialism.
Colonial and imperial powers have long sought to bring order to unruly, wetland ecosystems. Iliana Capozzoli follows this trend globally—and how mangroves fight back.
In the Caribbean and Andean regions of Colombia, women and children perform(ed) the necessary labor to sustain the rural communities at the heart of toxic production of tobacco. In tracing these histories of care and toxicity, Nicolás Felipe Rueda Rey and Margarita MartÃnez-Osorio ask what accountability looks like today.
Records of Tree Day ceremonies in Brazil’s public archives belie a mass felling of native trees over the twentieth century. Combining archival photographs with poetic text, the duo Paisagens Móveis re-craft the archive’s narrative through artwork: Cidade-Jardem, or Garden City.
Zachari Logan has built a career on drawing plants. In this interview, Isabelle Gapp talks with him about his residency at Kinngait Studios, where carpets of plants “erupt” across the tundra.
Tatsiana Shchurko follows potatoes through personal memories and uneven global histories. From the Andes to Belarus, she traces how the potato mediates imperial power while fueling peasant resistance and sustaining everyday life.
On the metropolitan archipelago of Tiohtià :ke/Mooniyang, where plastic intermingles with organic matter, mixed media artist Alex Côté Hallé creates art that intertwines the urban, the fluvial, and the queer.
What does a garden become in winter? Émilie Gervais explores winter’s sensory and narrative landscape through a community garden’s fence.
Catholic churches in the U.S. are decorated with a shared, recurring cycle of select plants. Rebecca Laurent and Emily Burke dig into the historical and political roots of poinsettias and Easter lilies and what their floral glory tells us about nature, religion, and colonialism.
In the thick of Greenbelt National Park, students in Jordan Lea Johnson’s feminist environmental studies class learn from invasive plants. A multispecies pedagogy prompts reflection on ecological narratives of invasion and mastery.
