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.
Tagged: Ideas of Nature
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.
Are You Afraid of the Dark?
Darkness is vanishing, and that’s a problem. Historian Kenneth Weisbrode and poet Heather H. Yeung explain how and why we seek out the dark.
Uprooting a Renter’s Garden
Gardening while in graduate school and on the academic job market means preparing to uproot, leaving a renter’s garden and broken promises behind.
Why Pigeons Can’t Be Pigeonholed
Consider the pigeon. Impossible to categorize as nature or culture, the space between these binaries is where they thrive.
There’s More Than One World. There’s a Pluriverse.
A researcher reflects on the pluriverse and how the idea of multiple worlds and ways of knowing reoriented her approach to fieldwork.
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.
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.
There’s No Escaping Oil, Even in the Wild Arctic
A renewed push to open the Arctic to oil and gas drilling leads one writer to investigate petromodernity, arguing that oil flows through ideas of the environment as much as it does through the economy.
The Alchemy of Early Photography
Four contemporary photographers use historical techniques to bring attention to the transient, illusory, and disposable items and people in our world. From tintype to cyanotype, these processes combine chemical knowledge and artistic insight.
