Learning to Love Human Traces in Wild Places
A photographer explores an aesthetic that finds beauty in the physical alterations people make to natural landscapes, from Yellowstone to a state park in Ohio.
Tagged: Ideas of Nature
When Laundry Detergent Was Edible
Long before Tide Pods, laundry soap was made from organic ingredients with familiar names and smells. When corporations started selling detergents made from synthetic chemicals, they had to redefine what clean smelled like.
The Avant-Garde Meets Ecology in the Open City
Communal living and artistic experimentation have thrived at the Open City for over forty years. In the face of pollution and environmental degradation, the collective of poets, artists, and a lone ecologist are reimagining green design.
The Swiftness of Glaciers: Language in a Time of Climate Change
As the climate changes, so does our language. Melting glaciers force us to rethink the metaphors we use to make sense of the world around us.
Private Land Conservation is Troubling—and Probably Indispensable
When a writer joins scientists on a mushroom hunt at a Gilded Age wilderness retreat, she grapples with the exclusions and inequalities that have produced such an ecologically valuable landscape.
Nine Women Who Are Rewriting the Environment
As we continue to celebrate Women’s History Month, here is a list of new and recent work by women writers whose environmental imaginations keep us all inspired, impassioned, and ready for whatever comes next.
Behind the Beauty of Orchids, Centuries of Violence
Following orchids in The Farming of Bones, a novel by Edwidge Danticat, exposes tangled webs of care, violence, and the lasting power of the colonial imagination.
A Firsthand Account of Finding Nature on a U.S. Military Base
We need to expand our ideas of nature to include the battlefield. A historian explains why we should view soldiers’ daily lives as part of the natural world.
In Annihilation, the Revolution Will Not Be Human
A science fiction novel offers a genre-bending perspective that helps us think about wildness, purity, and invasion in new and strange ways.
Thoreau, Now More than Ever: A Conversation with Laura Dassow Walls and Daegan Miller
Are there better ethics than hope? Two scholars with new books about the author of Walden reflect on Henry David Thoreau’s environmental ethic, flirtations with despair, and anarchist politics.
