Care is not simply an ethical disposition or a practice of lifemaking but a political struggle to defend and transform the conditions through which human and more-than-human life is sustained.
Content Index
In April of 1191, a gyrfalcon from the far north flew over Acre. How did it get there? Did it feel hot? Can one use scant medieval sources to explore the experiences of a bird that lived at the end of the twelfth century?
This article argues that Lin Zhao’s novel Chao Xi Tu provides a timely literary reworlding of the delta and its amphibious, more-than-human materialities, while mounting a powerful critique of Anthropocene violence, a force that continues to extract from and marginalize both the delta’s amphibious matter and its forms of knowledge.
Historian Timothy LeCain is interested in the bridge between humans and materiality. Last year, while driving his SUV home through the mountains of Montana, a large truck pulled in front of him and released a cloud of dense, noxious smoke. Like many cyclists, hybrid car drivers, and “No Kings” protestors, LeCain had been “coal rolled.” His tongue-in-cheek essay, “Thank God for the Coal Rollers,” explores the practice’s culture, intended victims, and even the unintended good it might enact.
Sometimes the link between environmental issues and creative action is a matter of personal expression. In “One Woman’s Waste Is Another Woman’s Treasure,” Regina M. Bichler, a waste and sustainability researcher, interviews the artist Kim Curtis on using environmental struggles and successes as artistic inspiration. Their conversation spans Curtis’s multimedia artworks, political strategies for minimizing environmental harms, and the roles that individuals must play in crafting ecological futures.
In “Mapped Futures, Vanishing Places,” literary scholar Kumiko Kiuchi portrays the simple act of walking as an opportunity to inherit shared memory. Her writing takes off from Tokyo’s artificial waterfront into a creative space stretching from past generations into imagined futures, reminding us to remain “attentive to what cannot be fully possessed or understood.”
Full open-access volume Vajont: The Political Ecology of an Unnatural Disaster (2026) by Marco Armiero.
Article by Rachel Carson Center alumna Mengxi Kou and colleagues on how protected areas can conserve wildlife while also safeguarding people’s livelihoods.
Full book, Climate Crisis as a Challenge for the Humanities: A Reader, edited by Karin Esders.
Full article titled “To Delight and Misinstruct: Strategic Environmental Narratives in New Yorker Fiction” by Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, Christopher A. Walker, Veronica Romero, Kiara McCellon, Claire Campbell, Moya Stringer, et al.