East Boston has the largest amount of made land in the City of Boston. It was originally comprised of five islands connected by acres of fluctuating tidal marshes and flats. The history of the Great Marsh exemplifies centuries of efforts to regulate and control the ambiguous space between land and sea.
What is the concept of “plant blindness”? How can the arts help us to appreciate different timescales and plants’ ways of being?
To wrap up this year’s anniversary week, the EHN team would like to showcase three essays featuring the life world of plants, animals, and water.
In an era marked by a pressing global climate crisis and alarming rates of biodiversity loss, natural history museums stand out as beacons of hope in our collective struggle against environmental degradation.
I no longer think that science holds little or no bias. Through entrenching heteronormativity and patriarchy, biases hurt not only the queer community but all communities, because they display a skewed image of reality. But perhaps there is hope in stories such as the Orca’s Song, where an osprey and an orca can be wives.
Throughout the past 150 years, the Peel underwent drastic changes due to drainage projects, turf-cutting, and animal farming. The new materialities these uses produced can make one almost forget that this used to be a peatland. However, Jeroen, an ornithologist, remarked upon the black waters surrounding grassland areas in the Peel. He argued that in these nutrient poor pools, the peatland was “peeking through” the fabric of the present-day landscape. The multiple pasts of the Peel were still present in the landscape’s materialities.
Among the varied significations circulating around the petroleum-powered car, the commodity has operated as a salient vehicle for expressions and tools of hetero-masculinity.
The dream of Herzegovina as California has been around for as long as I remember. It first appeared in Yugoslavia as an industrial and entrepreneurial vision of a landscape that could provide us with everything, provided we were sufficiently entrepreneurial. But it was also an image of a place of rest, where little is needed to enjoy life, in which case industrialisation may be unnecessary.
The Philippines’ Baguio: from an indigenous pastureland to a colonial hill station and now a bustling tourism center grappling with environmental challenges and Indigenous land disputes on its 115th founding anniversary.
![The cover image is an excerpt from a press article entitled “Ecological disaster in the upper valley. The Aude river polluted by a violent poison” (“Catastrophe écologique en Haute-Vallée. L’Aude polluée par un poison violent [sic]”), published by the regional newspaper L'Indépendant on 18 September 1983, the day after the pollution. Beneath the headline are two photographs. On the left lies a dead trout, “fallen victim to human stupidity” as the caption states (“Une truite splendide victime de la bêtise des hommes”). On the right, there are the inhabitants of Quillan perched on the city's old bridge, gazing out over the river. The caption reads: “A destruction that rallied all the Quillan residents” (“Une destruction qui a mobilisé tous les habitants de Quillan”).](https://i0.wp.com/envhistnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Image_LT.jpeg?fit=640%2C377&ssl=1)