The Environmental Histories of Desire
Greta LaFleur’s new book, The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America, shows how desire was produced in surprising ways alongside taxonomies of plants and racial difference in early British colonial texts.
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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.
The Art of Nature’s Nation: A Conversation with Alan C. Braddock
What can art history tell us about how artists imagine, interpret, and bear witness to environmental change? The new exhibition Nature’s Nation uses ecocritical art history to explore American environmental history and pose tough questions about what we need to do move forward.
Slow-Motion Disaster and Extreme Weather: Five Questions for Judith Helfand
The 1995 Chicago heat wave revealed how racism and poverty are the slow-motion disasters that become glaringly visible during extreme weather events. A new documentary film tells this story.
The Rise of Green Games
Environmental video games like “Walden, A Game” are a growing trend. Can they creatively intervene in climate change debates and inspire environmental awareness?
How the Soil Remembers Plantation Slavery
What haunts the land? Artists R.L. Martens and Bii Robertson dig up the tangled history of “the vampire crop,” slavery, and soil exhaustion in Maryland, revealing that the past is more present than you might think.
Why Animal Studies Must Be Antiracist: A Conversation with Bénédicte Boisseron
A new book, Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question, moves beyond familiar comparisons between race and species by drawing on Black studies.
Farm Life on an Energy Frontier
How does energy production affect agricultural livelihoods and the fabric of local communities in southwestern North Dakota? As wind turbines, oil rigs, and “man camps” spread across the region, responses from residents vary from resentment to acceptance.
Pollution Doesn’t Care About Borders: A Conversation with Elizabeth Hoover
An anthropologist uses community-based research methods to investigate environmental justice, reproductive health, and food sovereignty in Indigenous communities like the Akwesasne Mohawk in upstate New York.
How a Beaver Became a Twitter Star
A geoscientist crafts a viral research video with a little bit of patience and a whole lot of felt.
