Greta LaFleur's book discusses the relationship between the natural world and sexuality. This painting depicts a fish skewered on a brach. The branch also holds a blue jay and many smaller purple, red, pink, blue, and yellow birds.

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.

The two covers of Slobodian and Selcer's books, one a painting of a brown window and the other overlapping circles

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.

Alan C. Braddock

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.

A screenshot of Walden, a Game shows a man standing by a boat on the shore of the pond.

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?

Small conical red clay sculptures in a wooded lot.

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.

An rust, abandoned plow sits in the foreground with a hayfield full of wind turbines against a bright sky.

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.