Spotlight
Thank God for the Coal Rollersby Timothy James LeCain
20 minutes Last summer, I was driving the family SUV home after a day of mountain biking here in the Northern Rockies of Montana. Although I was going a bit fast...
One Woman’s Waste Is Another Woman’s Treasure: A Conversation with Kim Curtis
by Kim Curtis, and Regina M. Bichler
18 minutes
Kim Curtis is a fine artist whose work explores the history of landscape. In moments of insomnia, in order to guarantee herself a positive story, she ...Mapped Futures, Vanishing Places: On Inheritance at the Water’s Edge
22 minutes
I began thinking about the inheritance of memory not in a classroom or a library, but at the edge of a half-closed moat on Tsukudajima, an artificial ...The Future of the Environmental Humanities Is Not in the Seminar Room
by Rob Gioielli
10 minutes
Don’t get me wrong. I love a good seminar room discussion. Properly structured, with the right group of students or colleagues, a good text or topic t...The Mangrove Doesn’t Forget
13 minutes
The boat nudges against a half-drowned jetty, its wooden planks swollen and soft from the rains. Mira hesitates before stepping off. The tide is low, ...Tell Me a Story, Tell Me the World
by Jamie Wang
12 minutes
Amid an unprecedented socioenvironmental crisis, we continue to invent new words and concepts in an effort to respond to geological transformation and...Time After the Hero—Or, in Proposing the Age of the Anthropoiescene
16 minutes
Anthropo—forming terms relating to humanity or human beings; of multiple origins, borrowing from Latin, anthrōpo, and Greek, anthrōpos, “man; human be...The Futures We Tell
15 minutes
Keeping up with climate news has been hard recently, and not only because it is often buried beneath the screaming headlines of seemingly more immedia...The Best Is Yet to Come: Latin American Environmental History
by Claudia Leal
19 minutes
We humans are animals, our bodies teem with microscopic life, and our societies have developed in constant interaction with a material world that we c...Whale Fall
13 minutes
When a whale dies, it starts a slow sink to the bottom of the sea. What arrives and remains is called a whale fall. Unlike the carcasses of most aquar...Ignoring Religion Is Not an Option
by Kate Rigby
12 minutes
It is high time that the environmental humanities got religion. Don’t worry. This is not a call for conversion. At least not to any one faith traditio...Editor’s Note: Imagining Environmental Futures
by Christof Mauch, Pauline Kargruber, and Haley Snyder
6 minutes
The tenth issue of Springs: The Rachel Carson Center Review asks: What is the future of the environment? Participants from around the globe wer...Archive
Can Environmental Humanities Help Make a Better World?
by Poul Holm
7 minutes
What a strange question to ask, you may think: Of course research helps change the world. Or maybe your response is: What a naive question, the world ...Science in Fiction: A Brief Look at Communicating Climate Change Through the Novel
19 minutes
Responding to Lynda Walsh’s argument for looking at alternative models of knowledge production—and taking into account Jeroen Oomen’s argument in favo...Snakey Waters, or: How Marine Biology Structured Global Environmental Sciences
18 minutes
In the year 1902 an encounter of the monstrous kind aroused the attention of the German Kaiser. The Daily Chronicle announced the sighting of a giant ...The Neo-Materialist Flip
10 minutes
At the risk of revealing a lack of intellectual growth, my ideas have not changed so much as shifted since this essay came out. Four years later, the ...How Wild Is Wild?
12 minutes
Potter Stewart, a former Justice of the US Supreme Court, famously said of hard-core pornography that it was hard to define but he knew it when he saw...Stop Saving the Planet!—and Other Tips via Rachel Carson for Twenty-First-Century Environmentalists
by Jenny Price
42 minutes
Rachel Carson was a visionary. She’s a towering figure in the modern environmental movement. She’s widely considered to be its founding voice, and she...Climate-Sensitive Architecture as a Blueprint: Habits, Shades, and the Irresistible Staircase
15 minutes
Patterns of Desire The relationship of climate to the built environment has been of increasing interest over the past decade. As is generally known, t...A Dialogue on Form, Knowledge, and Representation
by Gregg Mitman, and Rob Nixon
15 minutes
Gregg Mitman: Disciplines impose a certain form and structure on the world. When we see calls for multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, or transdiscip...
South African Eden: The Kruger National Park
4 minutes
The world-renowned Kruger National Park—situated on South Africa’s boundary with Mozambique and comprising some 19.000 km²—has its origins in two colo...Chernobyl
7 minutes
I grew up in a country that does not exist anymore—East Germany or the GDR. Perhaps this partially explains my interest in Eastern Europe and its envi...Problematic Postage: Canada’s Claim to the Arctic through a Postage Stamp
by Daniel Dumas
7 minutes
Philatelic materials—postage stamps or documents related to postal history—are often overlooked in terms of their significance and impact on nation-bu...The Water Shops of Republican Tianjin
by Mu Cao
6 minutes
The city of Tianjin was one of China’s treaty ports with foreign concessions in the second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth ce...