Gardening is on the rise as the world quarantines during the COVID-19 pandemic. Anna Muenchrath considers the implications and opportunities of the quarantine garden in her review of The Poetics and Politics of Gardening in Hard Times.
Timothy Lorek compares two calendars from Colombia that offer competing visions of plantation presents and agricultural futures.
Current methods of composting came out of colonial plantation agriculture, but have become a key way of practicing polyculture and imagining multispecies communities.
John Wesley Powell is celebrated for his proposed land use reforms in the American West. But his vision did not include Indigenous peoples.
Dr. Shona Jackson discusses labor in the Caribbean and the need for radical, collective labor histories that include Creole groups and Indigenous peoples.
A new book, Border Land, Border Water: A History of Construction on the U.S.–Mexico Divide, traces border histories by looking to bridges as well as walls.
Bathsheba Demuth discusses her new book, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait, and Arctic histories of ecological crisis and hope.
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.
To understand the future of seabed mining, look to the economic and environmental histories of an industry that threatens the stability of the ocean floor.
An environmental historian explains why, for Vietnam’s rubber plantations and plantation workers, the specifics of colonialism, geography, and ecology matter.
