Weaponizing the Desert at the U.S.–Mexico Border
Border fencing straddles the Sonoran Desert and other harsh environments. Kevin Cooney shows how infrastructure gaps are key to U.S. immigration policy.
Category: Essays
OK, Doomers! The Climate Generation Has Arrived
The climate generation is coming of age. Sarah Jaquette Ray, author of A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety, explains what older generations have to learn.
John Wesley Powell’s Settler-Colonial Vision for the West
John Wesley Powell is celebrated for his proposed land use reforms in the American West. But his vision did not include Indigenous peoples.
Organic Farming’s Political History
Organic farming has far-right roots. While the movement has grown beyond those, its history shows why we must examine our theories of social change.
Are You Afraid of the Dark?
Darkness is vanishing, and that’s a problem. Historian Kenneth Weisbrode and poet Heather H. Yeung explain how and why we seek out the dark.
In Hawaiʻi, Plantation Tourism Tastes Like Pineapple
The Dole pineapple plantation has a destructive history of transforming the Hawaiian Islands. Mallory Huard describes how that continues today in the tourism industry.
Plant Monsters Turn Normal Upside Down
Julia Dauer argues that the plant monsters from the Netflix series Stranger Things share roots with 18th-century colonial terror of botanical powers. Unruly vegetation from the Upside Down calls for a wholesale reevaluation of normal in the contemporary US.
The Future of Landscape Architecture is TV
Inspired by TV as a medium, Marc Miller’s course in landscape architecture has students make environmental fiction about the future rather than design for the present.
Whose Utopia? American Ecofascism Since the 1880s
A 19th-century novel about a (white) women’s utopia at the center of the earth documents the long history of American eugenics and ecofascism.
Uprooting a Renter’s Garden
Gardening while in graduate school and on the academic job market means preparing to uproot, leaving a renter’s garden and broken promises behind.
