Walking through Ashio’s scarred mountains (Japan) and cutting grass along the Watarase River, fieldwork turns out to be less about gathering data and more about learning to sense how toxicity and care coexist.
A Platform on Representation, Engagement, and Community
Tag: landscape
The Raised Bog Underneath the Farm: Walking into the Past and the Present
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.
Hercegovina Kalifornija: Landscape and legacies in the Neretva Valley
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.
When Extinction Came to Disney World
The dusky seaside sparrow was a small songbird once abundant within a small range in Southern Florida.
A Well of One’s Own: Caste, Water, and Freedom
On a cool October morning in 2019, I visited Babu on his small plot of farmland, now a lush patchwork of vegetables that his wife sells at weekly markets in nearby towns.
The Containable Quagmire? Colonial Environmental Legacies and Continued Attempts to Control Swamps
In August 1938, nearly 12,000 majority-white New Deal laborers employed by the federal government began clearing land, relocating communities, and erecting a forty-two-mile system of dams and dikes under the direction of the South Carolina Public Service Authority.