Surrounded by a highly biodiverse desert ecosystem, the Rio Grande River creates a desert oasis. Yet the land around it is dry and vast, nationally contested and controlled, and scattered with ruins that span centuries and tell stories of the past.
Tag: environmental history
What Goes (Un)told: The (Hi)stories of the Brazil Nut in the Biodiversity Heritage Library
In this short piece, I share my work through the example of Bertholletia excelsa, commonly known as the Brazil nut.
Birds in Life and in Ink: An Errant Tracing
Oscar is a notoriously messy eater. Like all male Eclectus parrots, he uses his large candy-corn beak to pick up a piece of fruit and flings it across the kitchen floor.
GIS and the Mapping of Enslaved Movement: The Matrix of Risk
I’m a geographer, and that means I use GIS, an organized collection of computer hardware, software, and infrastructure. Using GIS, I map fugitivity in the Great Dismal Swamp, which involves acquiring, storing, analyzing, and digitizing geographic and related data.
Breaking With Discipline: Studying Environmental History
Some fantastic literature and theory sharpened the stakes of environmental history for me, not as a discipline, but as an enterprise encompassing various methods in understanding past and present socio-ecological transformations, worlds, and crises.
Writing Home into Environmental History
Practices of domesticity and the spaces of homes must be included in our conversations of place and environment.