"Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species"
Anna Tsing’s essay opens a door to multispecies landscapes as protagonists for histories of the world.
Anna Tsing’s essay opens a door to multispecies landscapes as protagonists for histories of the world.
This article blurs the boundaries of literature, agriculture, public history, grassroots political activism, and public policymaking in order to problematize the current eco-cosmopolitan trajectory of ecocritical theory.
Denis Byrne explores the 1880s reclamation of the Elizabeth Bay in Sydney Harbour, encountering historical influences such as sandstone wall constructions, buried objects, and colonial narratives. He argues in this article that archaeology has a role to play in bringing reclamations and other aspects of the Anthropocene into view.
Finn Arne Jørgensen brings Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s analysis of the relationship between technology, media, and the perception of landscape into the digital age as a way of examining the spatiality of digital media and the natural world.
Owain Jones raises questions about the relationships between self, time, memory, materiality, and place, using a non-representational creative approach based on image and textual collage.
Shannon Cram explores the slippery subjectivities of nuclear waste and nature at Washington State’s Hanford Nuclear Reservation, examining how this space is framed as both pristine habitat and waste frontier. She examines Hanford’s biological vector control program through the fruit fly and discusses how vector control uses instances of nuclear trespass to articulate the boundary between contaminated and uncontaminated. She concludes that nature is being recruited to do what the U.S. Department of Energy cannot: solve Hanford’s nuclear waste problem.
In this article for a Special Section on “Inheriting the Ecological Legacies of Settler Colonialism,” Alexander R. D. Zahara and Myra J. Hird explore the ways in which western and Inuit cosmologies differentially inform particular relationships with the inhuman, and “trash animals” in particular. They compare vermin control practiced in Canada’s waste sites with the freedom of ravens to explore waste sites within Inuit communities, arguing that waste and wasting exist within a complex set of historically embedded and contemporaneously contested neo-colonial structures and processes.
In this review essay, Jennifer Hamilton responds to Michael Marder’s book, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (2013), exploring three of Marder’s concepts, plant “nourishment,” “desire” and “language,” through readings of Gabrielle de Vietri’s installation The Garden of Bad Flowers (2014), the story of Daphne from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 CE) and Alice’s encounter with talking flowers in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871).
Erika Amethyst Szymanski investigates the impact of synthetic yeast, which is gaining ground in a variety of foodscapes, and reflects upon the meaning of Terroir that synthetic yeast brings about.
The author works on the notion of “watershed encounter” as a diverging point in history to analyze which watershed encounters shaped the Chesapeake Bay region. He argues that current restoration efforts, far from solving the current issues, only exacerbate them.