In this Springs article, environmental historian Donald Worster delves into the material events behind cultural imaginaries in China, while asking for an ecological civilization. “Can humans learn, by subordinating their appetites to their brains, how to live on this earth intelligently and ethically?”

While reading Baron von Humboldt’s 1807 Essay on the Geography of Plants, Paula Unger writes about modern science creating boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, and how Indigenous understandings transcend them.

In this Springs article, landscape historian Sonja Dümpelmann and Rachel Carson Center editor Pauline Kargruber discuss plants in an urban environment.

In this Springs article, historian Melanie Arndt examines how the foundations for production, perception, and consumption of heating were laid at the turn of the twentieth century.