Mainstream environmental discourse often employs emotions like fear, guilt, and outrage. But what about irony, humor, and irreverence? What feelings and what people get left out of environmentalism when we have such a limited emotional range?
A historian planned a small study of cigarette culture. But she ended up uncovering a transnational network of seeds, plants, knowledge, and racist ideologies, and writing a book that transforms how we conceive of corporations and empire.
Last week’s IPCC report sunk the spirits of many. But one veteran activist, with no time for despair, still believes in the power of citizens.
With Aldo Leopold, Lao Tzu, and the trickster Coyote as his guides through the city, a writer explores how to live well with beavers, falcons, and the urban wilderness.
How is the musical history of animal imitation caught up in racism, sexism, and imperialist nostalgia? From classical music to whistling, this conversation explores the art and ethics of imitating, recording, and selling the sounds of the nonhuman world.
An ecocritic had just finished a book chapter on Sherman Alexie’s poetry when accusations about his sexual misconduct went viral last spring. She asks if environmental humanities scholars should continue to engage with the work of abusers, and why certain writers and scholars come to dominate our archives in the first place.
The historian who wrote the book on a half millennium of Caribbean hurricanes turns to the still-unfolding disaster in Puerto Rico.
Controversial plastic straw bans continue to make headlines. A cultural analysis helps weigh the most recent legislation and asks whether bans on single-use plastics offer a path toward a more sustainable future or a distraction from systemic change.
How does the celebrated author of the new story collection “Florida” write books in a poisoned, warming world? “By being constantly, constantly angry. All day long.”
Two geographers, co-editors of the new volume Historical Animal Geographies, discuss how the animals around us shape our histories, our environments, and the stories we tell about the world.
