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.
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?”
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.
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.
Franz-Josef Brüggemeier outlines the history one of the most crucial energy source of twentieth-century Europe in this article. “Coal returned to center stage again and again. In both world wars, coal provided the material basis for the atrocities committed and was of decisive importance in the subsequent search for lasting peace.”
Rita Brara and María Valeria Berros argue for the importance of a legal recognition of rivers. “What we want for rivers now is an institution that can be entrusted with their environmental protection on a global scale.”
An analysis of the book Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh.
An essay on end times and the Anthropocene.
