In this commentary piece, the six authors attempt to “reboot” or reinstitute a concept close to the heart of the Moderns, namely the assumption that the traditional concept of nature, as developed through modern European history, would no longer be adequate to a future beset by environmental crises.
Chisholm’s article explores how contemporary music cultivates ecological thinking and climate-change awareness. Her essay investigates the music of John Luther Adams and his style of composing with climatic elements and natural forces.
In this commentary piece, Donna Haraway calls for the stretching and recomposition of kin and kinship, as all earthlings are kin in the deepest sense. She feels it is past time to practice better care of kinds-as-assemblages (not species one at a time).
Marovich’s article for the Special Commentary section of Environmental Humanities explores Pope Francis’s Laudato si’, examining the complexity in his chosen namesake of Saint Francis and how this relates to the religious diversity implied in his encyclical.
James Hatley’s article for the ‘Living Lexicon for the Environmental Humanities’ section discusses the horizon of the ‘Aion’ (as formulated in the four geological eons), and the fact that every species is linked in genetic kinship.
Martin’s article explores the rise of the line graph and an associated statistical method, linear regression, in ecology, contending that not only has ecologists’ use of linear regression shaped understandings of nature, but ecologists’ understandings of nature have also shaped their use of linear regression.
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.
Greear examines the contemporary trend toward de-industrialized and decentralized production and its implications for ecological sustainability. He suggests we can understand the potential positive ecological implications of such trends by reconceptualizing “incomplete information” in markets, which is often understood as a key way in which markets fail to solve or forestall environmental problems.
The author argues that the uncritical acceptance of the idea “invasions” of introduced organisms are the “second greatest threat” to species extinction exemplifies confirmation bias in scientific advocacy.
Matthew MacLellan argues that Garrett Hardin’s primary object of critique in his influential “The Tragedy of the Commons” is not the commons or shared property at all—as is almost universally assumed by Hardin’s critics—but is rather Adam Smith’s theory of markets and its viability for protecting scarce resources.
