Marovich’s article for the Special Commentary section of Environmental Humanities explores Pope Francis’s Laudato si’, examining the complexity in his chosen namesake of Saint Francis and how this relates to the religious diversity implied in his encyclical.
Content Index
James Hatley’s article for the ‘Living Lexicon for the Environmental Humanities’ section discusses the horizon of the ‘Aion’ (as formulated in the four geological eons), and the fact that every species is linked in genetic kinship.
Martin’s article explores the rise of the line graph and an associated statistical method, linear regression, in ecology, contending that not only has ecologists’ use of linear regression shaped understandings of nature, but ecologists’ understandings of nature have also shaped their use of linear regression.
Shannon Cram explores the slippery subjectivities of nuclear waste and nature at Washington State’s Hanford Nuclear Reservation, examining how this space is framed as both pristine habitat and waste frontier. She examines Hanford’s biological vector control program through the fruit fly and discusses how vector control uses instances of nuclear trespass to articulate the boundary between contaminated and uncontaminated. She concludes that nature is being recruited to do what the U.S. Department of Energy cannot: solve Hanford’s nuclear waste problem.
Greear examines the contemporary trend toward de-industrialized and decentralized production and its implications for ecological sustainability. He suggests we can understand the potential positive ecological implications of such trends by reconceptualizing “incomplete information” in markets, which is often understood as a key way in which markets fail to solve or forestall environmental problems.
The author argues that the uncritical acceptance of the idea “invasions” of introduced organisms are the “second greatest threat” to species extinction exemplifies confirmation bias in scientific advocacy.
This 1880 map centered on Chicago displays the early CB&Q railroad route.
ENHANCE is a four-year innovative training network (ITN) funded by Marie Skłodowska Curie that is dedicated to further establishing the Environmental Humanities as a field of cutting-edge scholarship in Europe and further afield.
Matthew MacLellan argues that Garrett Hardin’s primary object of critique in his influential “The Tragedy of the Commons” is not the commons or shared property at all—as is almost universally assumed by Hardin’s critics—but is rather Adam Smith’s theory of markets and its viability for protecting scarce resources.
Szerszynski’s article for the Special Commentary section of Environmental Humanities explores Pope Francis’s Laudato si’, particularly his call for a new “geo-spiritual formation.”