insects

This essay looks at the career of Marston Bates and his turn from mosquito researcher to public intellectual.

Tracing ticks in two different artworks and Leslie Feinberg’s activist writing, Wibke Straube takes their lead in this article from philosopher Donna Haraway and her suggestion to think about engagement with the environment through an “ethics of response-ability.”

In the afterword of a special section on toxic embodiment, Stacy Alaimo distills the collection’s argument for attending to the ways environments, human bodies, and nonhuman bodies are transformed by anthropogenic substances.

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.