landscapes

This collection highlights three quintessentially Canadian themes: seasonality, links between mobility and natural resource development, and urbanites’ experiences of the environment through mobility. It divides the intersection of environmental and mobility history into two approaches. The chapters in the first section deal primarily with the construction and productive use of mobility technologies and infrastructure, as well as their environmental constraints and consequences. The chapters in the second section focus on consumers’ uses of those vehicles and pathways: on pleasure travel, tourism, and recreational mobility.

In this special issue on Multispecies Studies, Cary Wolfe and Maria Whiteman discuss the changing notions of landscape and nature at work in the video installation Mountain Pine Beetle and explores some of the forces that eventuated in the devastated landscapes of the Rocky Mountain West brought on by the infestation of the mountain pine beetle beginning in the early 2000s—an infestation caused, in no small part, by what some scientists have called a perfect storm of circumstances created by global warming.

Monika Krause and Katherine Robinson follow up on the observation that charismatic species attract a disproportionate amount of attention and resources in international conservation by investigating how cultural schemas and organizational routines shape resource allocation in conservation more broadly.

Margaret Cook exposes the dominant socio-economic and political values that shaped flood management between 1974 and 2011 in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.

Carter et al. translate key themes from scenario narratives into spatial representations using Geographic Information Systems (GIS). They apply this technique to a Tasmanian case study exploring future scenarios for biodiversity in a predominantly privately-owned agricultural landscape, enabling land managers to explore outcomes from potential interventions and identify strategies that might mitigate the impact of future issues of environmental concern.

In this Special Section on Familiarizing the Extraterrestrial / Making Our Planet Alien, edited by Istvan Praet and Juan Francisco Salazar, Antonia Walford and Donnacha Kirk explore how taking physical cosmology and the entities that populate its fringes on their own terms might prompt anthropology to rethink what and how it thinks of life.

In this Special Section on Familiarizing the Extraterrestrial / Making Our Planet Alien, edited by Istvan Praet and Juan Francisco Salazar, Leah V. Aronowsky uses the history of an unrealized technology, the bioregenerative life-support system, to rethink conventional accounts of American spaceflight that cast the space cabin as the ultimate expression of humans’ capacity to technologically master their environments.

In this Special Section on Familiarizing the Extraterrestrial / Making Our Planet Alien, edited by Istvan Praet and Juan Francisco Salazar, Salazar explores world-making processes through which extreme frontiers of life are made habitable, arguing that microbial worlds are becoming part of worlding processes and projects that further these frontiers.

In this Special Section on Familiarizing the Extraterrestrial / Making Our Planet Alien, edited by Istvan Praet and Juan Francisco Salazar, Jessica O’Reilly compares the paramilitary practicalities of Antarctic research station and field camp life with the visions of the Antarctic as a place of sublime wild nature, violent death, and climate disaster.

In this Special Section on Familiarizing the Extraterrestrial / Making Our Planet Alien, edited by Istvan Praet and Juan Francisco Salazar, Istvan Praet focuses on the ultraviolet spectrum to examine how astrobiologists look at celestial bodies, planetary atmospheres, the skin, and the eye. He offers a reflection on how outer space can be apprehended from a humanities perspective.