I am walking in a Wardian Case. Above the historic West India docks, above the newly opened Elizabeth line, yet dwarfed by the skyscrapers that crowd the dockland horizon of east London.
![Giant prickled rhubarb and banana trees grow the foreground, surrounded by other plants in low beds. A winding pathway running through the middle. Behind the plants, everything is enclosed by a curved roof of wooden beams arranged in triangle formations, with blue sky visible in the background.](https://i0.wp.com/envhistnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Stevens_EHN_coverimage_v2-4-scaled.jpg?fit=640%2C480&ssl=1)
I am walking in a Wardian Case. Above the historic West India docks, above the newly opened Elizabeth line, yet dwarfed by the skyscrapers that crowd the dockland horizon of east London.
To flesh out the labor between humans and animals, I sometimes find myself struggling to write between the “real” and “representational” interactions I experience on farms and see on paper in the archive.
Why do we tell those eerie stories, the ones we share at social events? Ghost stories often reveal more about a community’s concerns at a specific point in time. One such example can be found in suburban Melbourne, Australia.
Now that I’m pursuing a doctoral degree in the highly interdisciplinary field of environmental history, I have come to embrace new research methods.