Environmental Humanities (journal)

Miriam Tola explores the entwinement of fascist biopolitics and the chemical industry at the site of the former chemical-textile plant Ex-SNIA Viscosa from the 1920s to the 1950s, and how this affected human and nonhuman bodies.

Tracing ticks in two different artworks and Leslie Feinberg’s activist writing, Wibke Straube takes their lead in this article from philosopher Donna Haraway and her suggestion to think about engagement with the environment through an “ethics of response-ability.”

In the afterword of a special section on toxic embodiment, Stacy Alaimo distills the collection’s argument for attending to the ways environments, human bodies, and nonhuman bodies are transformed by anthropogenic substances.

In a special section entitled “Living Lexicon for the Environmental Humanities,” Sara J. Grossman reflects on the definition of disability and disabled communities within environmental humanities.

Stefan Skrimshire considers the ethical question of how to communicate with future human societies in terms of long-term disposal of radioactive fuel. He proposes that the confessional form (as propagated by Saint Augustine and critiqued by Derrida) may become increasingly pertinent to activists, artists, and faith communities making sense of humanity’s ethical commitments in deep time.

Jonathan Woolley borrows the folkloristic, East Anglia figure of Black Shuck, a devilish hound, and connects it to a narrative of the Anthropocene based on the notions of inescapable mortality, deep time, and responsibility.

The authors put forward the idea of “speculative geology” to explain the violence inherent in volcanism, drawing on three volcanic episodes and the more recent unexpected striking of magma in Iceland’s Krafla volcanic caldera.

Considering Caroline Wendling’s living artwork White Wood (2014) in northeast Scotland, the author examines the relationship between deep time, ecology, and enchantment.

Christine Hansen uses the concept of deep time to challenge the idea that never-before-witnessed events are unprecedented. Using the case of a massive firestorm in 2009 in southeast Australia, she calls into question the shallow temporal frames through which deep time environmental phenomena are understood in Australian settler culture and offers an insight into often unnoticed ways in which contemporary society struggles with the colonial legacy.

The authors introduce a special section of Environmental Humanities on manifestations of deep time through places, objects, and practices, focusing on three modes through which it is encountered: enchantment, violence, and haunting.