Painting an Empire: Landscapes of Napoleon’s Dreams in Haiti
French landscape painting during the Haitian Revolution lays bare colonial concern for controlling both people and the environment.
Tagged: Ideas of Nature
Seven Ways of Looking at an Eclipse
We know the effects total solar eclipses have on birds, squirrels, and spiders. But what do they do to people?
The Wild Bunch: A Conversation with Curt Meine and Gavin Van Horn
An important new essay collection avoids the old arguments about wilderness and instead offers 26 meditations on living well in our places.
The (Built) Environmental Revolution: A Conversation with Sarah Williams Goldhagen
We know nature is good for our brains. Can buildings be, too? A preeminent architectural critic calls for a radical shift in how we design the places where we live, work, and play.
From TNT to Tallgrass: Prairie Restoration at a Munitions Plant Turned National Grassland
It was the world’s largest munitions plant. Now it’s a rich grassland teeming with wildflowers, hikers, and even a bison herd. Illinois’s Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie offers an environmental success story for our time.
Knowing Prairies: An Essay in Comic Form
What can the world’s first restored prairie tell us about living with the land? The University of Wisconsin–Madison Arboretum inspires one artist to reflect on ecological restoration and what we call nature.
The Art of Anxious Environments
Through art, Yayoi Kusama takes an extreme challenge, mental illness, and connects to millions, inviting viewers into the curious and profound beauty of her interior world. Encountering Kusama’s art inspired the author of this essay to reach through her own “a wall of silence” and use art to express her anxious environment.
Politics for a Maimed World: A Conversation with Jedediah Purdy
The acclaimed cultural critic and author of “After Nature” set off to explore the uncharted depths of the Anthropocene. But he found Thoreau there waiting for him.
Creationism, Mastodons, and Natural History in Kentucky
In northern Kentucky, conflicting stories about natural history mirror the religious and scientific debates of the late eighteenth century.
Natural Food to Eat When Changing the World
Two recipes drawn from research reveal how cookbook authors believed natural food had the ability to withstand physical, moral, and social degradation.
