A Love Letter to Weeds
Weeds are maligned as useless, or even harmful, plants. But Tabitha Faber has always had an affection for them, and thinks they can teach us something about how communities of all kinds can practice better relationships.
Tagged: Ideas of Nature
Unexpected Multispecies Entanglements at a Horse Stable
While working at a stable, Nicholas Miller uncovers a space for more than just horses and complex web of relationships among the dogs, cats, bats, and birds that make a home there.
When Wetland Restoration and Big Oil Collide
Walking through the Baytown Nature Center near Houston, Texas, Gardiner Brown traces how this wildlife sanctuary is enmeshed with the local petrochemical industry and makes a case for imperfect restoration.
Traces of Industry in the Trees of Jefferson National Forest
Chelsea Fisher follows the entangled histories of iron and paper in a second-growth forest.
Get Playful With These Six Environmental Board Games
Eco-themed board games are having a moment. Nate Carlin traces how these games have evolved from using nature as an inviting aesthetic to more fully incorporating ecological principles in game design and play.
Why Are Anti-Vaxxers Obsessed With the “Natural”?
In this written correspondence, emery jenson talks to Dr. Traci Brynne Voyles about how ableist and racist thinking along with a narrow conception of “environmentalism” have propped up the anti-vaccination movement.
Badwater (a Kinship Series Essay)
Daegan Miller recounts his close encounter with a buffalo herd and the fraught political history of the Badlands in this essay with audio narration excerpted from Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations, a five-volume book series.
Attuning the Senses
In this multimedia meditation, Petra Rethmann describes how the practice of sensorial attunement (or attention to the world around her) brought healing and clarity to her pandemic isolation.
Thinking Beyond the “Wild” Pandemic
Alice Rudge examines how the language of “nature” has amplified xenophobia and reinforced colonial moral hierarchies during the COVID-19 pandemic.
How Being “an Environmentalist” Became an Identity
In the 1960s, environmentalists often pitted the “natural self” against “artificial” social identities like race, class, and gender. Alexander Menrisky argues that this vocabulary still obscures issues of environmental justice in the U.S. today.
