We know where trees grow, but what about ideas? Writer and literary scholar Samantha Walton used to think of research centers as static offices and corridors, hubs for ideas to cluster and sprout. But at the Landhaus, an eco-farm in Bavaria, it is on walks with other fellows where their “thoughts strung out like threads across the paths” they traversed together.
Trees are also entangled with politics. In “An Otherworldly Species: Joshua Trees and the Conservation-Climate Dilemma” historian Thomas M. Lekan discusses what he considers a false choice between climate protection and conservation.
China and the United States are in a fierce competition, but what about Europe? Spotlighting “twenty-first century ecological politics,” environmental studies and public policy scholar Sophia Kalantzakos wonders: “Can Brussels and Beijing get it right?”
This article brings together feminist technoscience and more-than-human theory on care with Lacanian psychoanalytic theories of anxiety and desire.
On Lord Howe Island, writer Cameron Muir has a run-in with a nearly extinct species: the woodhen. In the 1970s, scientists counted just 15 birds. Now the number is around 300, yet he calls this an encounter with a ghost species and contemplates how the fate of the lone bird he meets overlaps with the fate of humans.
This article analyzes the role of soil in the making of authoritarian regimes and illustrates twentieth-century practices and discourses related to fertility across the globe.
In this article, historian Kate Brown considers the connections between plants, biospheres, and the politics of breathing. “What can the history of controlled environments tell us,” she asks, “about how we understand the planet today?”
In this article, historian Kate Brown considers the connections between plants, biospheres, and the politics of breathing. “What can the history of controlled environments tell us,” she asks, “about how we understand the planet today?”
This article argues for the term “uncanny water” as a conceptual tool for reading contemporary oceanic fictions.
This article sheds light on the diversity of meanings and connotations that tend to be lost or hidden in translations between different conceptualizations of nature in East and South-East Asia.
