A Note from the Editors:
To wrap up this year’s anniversary week, the executive editorial team decided to create a retrospective featuring some of our favorite essays, two from this past year and two from years past. They represent the wide range of topics and themes that have resonated with our community. From this past year, Nina Foster speaks to the importance of small mammals and microbial soil in understanding broader environmental change, while Genna Kane demonstrates the importance of understanding “settlement” as a process through a historical tracing of reclaimed land in East Boston. From years past, Aadita Chaudhury takes us on a journey into the dreamscape geography of her hybrid homes, while April Anson unravels the logic and rhetoric of American ecofascism in this age of hyper media saturation. In the spirit of showing the range and diversity of essays published on EHN this year, we have also created an “archive” of original publications in English and in translation; essays crossposted in collaboration with our friends at NiCHE, Edge Effects, and Arcadia; and our special anniversary releases from this week. Thank you for celebrating our seventh year as a community. Enjoy and keep reading!
1. The Case for Weighing Voles on Your Vacation
By Nina Foster
Originally published on December 17, 2024
[Image Description: An Earthwatch trip leader holds a captured bank vole while his colleague uses an instrument to measure the vole’s tail.]
Visualize your dream vacation.
Maybe you’re stretched out on a towel, listening to waves swell and crash on a sandy shore. Or taking the first bite of a still-warm, flaky croissant on a hotel balcony in Paris. Perhaps you’re shaking urine- and feces-stained cotton out of a metal trap on a cold morning in the Pyrenees Mountains, listening for the gentle patter of mouse, vole, or shrew footsteps against the plastic bag.
Not so sure about that last one? Let me explain. Keep Reading
2. Fluctuating and Fragmented: The History of Regulating the Tidal Salt Marsh near Wood Island in East Boston, Massachusetts
By Genna (Genevieve) Kane
Originally published on October 28, 2024
[Image description: A tidal marsh, with trees and other green vegetation in the foreground and a distant airport in the background.]
East Boston, a neighborhood across the harbor from downtown, has the largest amount of made land (also called filled or reclaimed land) in the City of Boston. Most of East Boston’s made land accommodates Logan International Airport, which has a fraught history with the neighborhood. East Boston residents remember how the Massachusetts Port Authority (Massport) aggressively took neighborhood space by eminent domain for the airport’s expansion only a few decades ago. Massport bulldozed Neptune Road one morning in 1967 with almost no warning to the residents, and gradually removed the homes along the road up to the 1990s. Many East Boston residents mourn Massport’s destruction of Neptune Road and the once-treasured Wood Island Park to this day. However, the Wood Island Park area is more than a story of loss from twentieth-century urban development. Keep Reading
3. Spatial Promiscuity and the Search for Home
By Aadita Chaudhury
Originally published December 28, 2018.
[Image Description: Painting of a room with a door wide open to the sea.]
In the last couple of years, I have had a recurring dream. Perhaps, not quite a recurring dream, since the events in the dreamscape always differed. There were different timelines, and situations, but the reason why I call them recurring is that they all shared a distinctive geographical feature. The setting of the dreamscape was a patchwork of various landmarks, neighbourhoods, and areas of the city of Toronto and the small town of Santiniketan in India. In these dreams, I’d find myself walking out of a lecture hall in the front campus of the University of Toronto, only to walk to my parents’ house in Santiniketan, just a few blocks away. Or I’d bike through Kensington Market, only to end up in Sonajhuri Forest. Both of these places are that which I have called home, and both are places I have outgrown. My hope in the year 2019 is to move away from Toronto, for good—I have felt stagnant and stuck in Toronto for a while, with one thing or another keeping me around while the feeling of restlessness only grew stronger in me. Keep Reading
4. No One Is a Virus: On American Ecofascism
By April Anson
Originally published on October 21, 2020
[Image Description: A statue of President Theodore Roosevelt on a horse lies on the ground, pushed off its pedestal by protestors. Graffiti on the pedestal reads “Murderer” and “Stolen Land.” Yellow caution tape surrounds the scene.]
In mid-March of this year, a storytelling strain tore through the internet–what a New York Times reporter dubbed the “Coronavirus Nature Genre.” This genre, comprised primarily of tweeted memes, expressed relief and wonder at lower air pollution, animals roaming urban roadways, and the clearer water of Italian canals. The sentiment found an elevated platform when the UN’s environment chief, Inger Andersen, claimed that nature was sending us a message. But the genre is most succinctly summed up in Twitter poetics:
[Image description: A screenshot of a tweet from user Thomas Schulz on March 17, 2020. The tweet reads: “Wow… Earth is recovering. Air pollution is slowing down. Water pollution is clearing up. Natural wildlife returning home. Coronavirus is Earth’s vaccine. We’re the virus.”
The internet was quick to respond in lolz, parodying the statement’s latent ecofascism. While the above tweet has since been removed, the sentiment it captures certainly remains. I see it in my students’ earnest ire at the Anthropocene epoch. Even as they recognize not all humans have created the conditions which the “era of the human” describes, they still frequently voice their frustration with “us,” we who kill the planet like a virus. In current humanities classrooms at San Diego State University and English majors and environmental humanities groups at University of Pennsylvania, this year I have witnessed a diverse range of students articulating their anger through this universalist language. The impulse likely, and understandably, emerges from a too-rare glimpse of non-human flourishing in landscapes often marked by unmitigated destruction. A reasonable response. However, attributing such phenomena to “healing” continues a murderous intellectual tradition that is at once both global and virally American. Keep Reading
Environmental History Now Archive
September 2024 – September 2025
[Image Description: Abstract face in profile using multicolored dried and pressed flowers, leaves, and stems.]
Original Essays in English
- “‘Premature Electrification’: Petro-Masculine Panic in the EV Era” by Amelia Diehl
- “The Raised Bog Underneath the Farm: Walking into the Past and the Present” by Caroline Kreysel
- “The Role of Natural History Museums in Science and Communication” by Araceli Ramos
- “Fluctuating and Fragmented: The History of Regulating the Tidal Salt Marsh near Wood Island in East Boston, Massachusetts” by Genna (Genevieve) Kane
- “Embracing an Atypical Approach to Invasion Science” by Diana Rodríguez Cala
- “The Vernacular is Not Barbaric” by Mennaallah Abotaleb
- “The Case for Weighing Voles on Your Vacation” by Nina Foster
- “When Deeper Isn’t Better: A Mining Misadventure in Early Modern Sumatra” by Wenrui Zhao
- Book Review: “Hope and Dystopia: Learning From Climate Fiction” by Kate Prengel
Original Essays in English and in Translation
- “Injuries to the Environment and the Guarani in Cerrado during Brazil’s Military Dictatorship” by Agnes Para Poty Rodrigues
- Portuguese translation: “Os Danos Para O Ambiente E Para Os Guarani No Cerrado Durante A Ditadura Militar” by Agnes Para Poty Rodriguez
- “The Hegemony of the West in Invasion Science” by Diana Rodríguez Cala
- Part I: “Present Conditions and Paths to Change“
- Part II: “European Empires and the Problem of Invasive Species“
- Castilian Spanish translation: “La Hegemonía Del Occidente En La Ciencia De La Invasión: Estado Actual Y Caminos Hacia El Cambio” by Diana Rodríguez Cala
Crossposted Essays
- “Turning the Tide: A Queer Look at the Orca” by Teja Šosterič (from NiCHE)
- “Plant Blindness and ‘Seeing’ Vegetal Timescales” by Katherine Cheung (from Edge Effects)
- “Axes on the Ground: Wolves and Women on the North American Frontier” by Caroline Abbott (from Arcadia)
EHN 7th Anniversary Essays
- “Strange Assemblages: The Environmental Uncanny and the British Wildlife Park” by Rae Ferner-Rose
- Book Review: “Collective Memory and Survivance” by Katie Ione Craney
- “Living with Smoke: A Comic for the Fire Season” by Mica Jorgenson (crosspost from NiCHE)
- “Scaling the Ivory Tower: The Neo-liberalization of Academia” by Valeria Zambianchi and Ana Buchadas
*Cover image: The four images are taken from the cover image of each featured essay.
[Cover image description: Nina Foster’s black and white photo in the upper left-hand corner shows an Earthwatch trip leader holding a captured bank vole while his colleague uses an instrument to measure the vole’s tail. Genna Kane’s photo in the upper right-hand corner shows a tidal marsh, with trees and other green vegetation in the foreground and a distant airport in the background. The lower left-hand corner displays “Room by the Sea,” a painting by Edward Hopper, 1951. And in the lower right-hand corner is an Independent Media PDX photo of a toppled statue of President Theodore Roosevelt in Portland, Oregon.]