Damming God? Making Sense of the Plan to Fix Niagara Falls
Recent news of restoration work at Niagara Falls provides an opportunity to reflect on how symbolic American landscapes become meaningful despite constant change.
Category: Essays
Brooklyn’s Empire Stores and the Future of the Waterfront
Trash uncovered beneath an 1860s Brooklyn warehouse encourages us to reconsider our contemporary relationship to urban waterfronts.
Alan Bennett: An Ecological Storyteller
An ecologist channels a lifetime of studying birds into intricate wood carvings.
Broadcasting the Wisconsin Idea: A Local History
The establishment of Station 9XM and experimental educational broadcasting is part of a larger story of radio and The Wisconsin Idea.
Blueprints for the Semester: Revisiting How to Plan Environmental Pedagogy
As the spring semester approaches, we revisit suggestions for how to conduct careful lesson planning around environmental issues.
The Shape of Hope
Fishing provides the opportunity to reconsider the grounds for hope in this time of the Anthropocene.
Chloroform and Butcher Birds: Violence in Late 19th-Century Children’s Literature
Children’s novels from the nature study movement contain strikingly violent episodes, a fact that pushes us to rethink our understanding of period environmental ethics.
Killing Birds
The recent collection of a rare bird re-ignites the debate among scientists and broader publics about the value of lethal techniques for studying wildlife.
Drip Torch Weddings and Environmental Rituals
Devising a fire ritual for a friend’s wedding inspires one author to consider how environmental rituals connect sacred and ordinary parts of our lives.
Working the Edge; or, How We Built This Thing
One year since launch, our founding managing editor looks back on building Edge Effects.
