Excerpt from Rivers on the Move: Waterways in Human Life from the Ice Age to the Anthropocene, edited by Bathsheba Demuth, Mark A. Healey, Giacomo Parrinello, and Laurence C. Smith.
Content Index
Environmental lawyer Valeria Berros interviews the Rachel Carson Center’s founding director Christof Mauch on his notion of slow hope.
Multispecies research relies on multisensory methods to know other earthly beings. This new mode of research faces a double challenge: how to know others in multi-sensory ways and how to document and communicate them back to a human audience.
In 1855, John Dominy created the first human-mediated hybrid orchid, paving the way for a unique symbiotic relationship between people and plants.
Full book of Urbanizing the Future: A New City Project in Agrarian South India by Carol Upadhya.
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.
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.