environmental humanities

What inspires desire for plants? In The Cactus Hunters, Jared Margulies takes readers through the intriguing world of succulent collecting, where collectors and conservationists alike are animated by passions that sometimes exceed the limits of the law. His globe-spanning journey offers complex insight into the fields of botany and criminology, political ecology and human geography, and psychoanalysis. Here, Margulies is joined in conversation with Samantha Walton.

Jared Margulies is assistant professor of political ecology in the Department of Geography at the University of Alabama. Margulies is author of The Cactus Hunters: Desire and Extinction in the Illicit Succulent Trade.

Samantha Walton is professor of modern literature at Bath Spa University in England. Walton is author of Everybody Needs Beauty: In Search of the Nature Cure and The Living World: Nan Shepherd and Environmental Thought.

EPISODE REFERENCES:

Nan Shepherd

The Detectorists (British comedy series)

Sheffield Branch of the British Cactus and Succulent Society

Cactus and Succulent Society of America

Jacques Lacan

Sigmund Freud

Hannah Dickinson

Paul Kingsbury

Anna Secor

Lucas Pohl

Robert Fletcher / Failing Forward

Alberto Vojtech Frič

Locations discussed:

England

Brazil

Czech Republic

Mexico

The Cactus Hunters: Desire and Extinction in the Illicit Succulent Trade is available from University of Minnesota Press.

"This book offers a powerful example of the value of close attention to the entangled lives of plants and their people."
—Thom van Dooren, author of A World in a Shell: Snail Stories for a Time of Extinctions

"A deeply felt and nuanced reckoning with desire as a structurally produced and world-making force—a unique and major contribution to political ecology."
—Rosemary Collard, author of Animal Traffic: Lively Capital in the Global Exotic Pet Trade

In this episode, I chat with Christina Gerhardt about her new book, Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean, the politics of the climate crisis, poetry of islanders, and the environmental humanities.

Christina Gerhardt is Associate Professor at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, Senior Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, and former Barron Professor of Environment and the Humanities at Princeton University. Her environmental journalism has been published by Grist.org, The Nation, The Progressive, and the Washington Monthly. 

Christina’s new book, Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean weaves together essays, maps, art, and poetry to show us—and make us see—island nations in a warming world.

Synopsis of Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean : 

Low-lying islands are least responsible for global warming, but they are suffering the brunt of it. This transportive atlas reorients our vantage point to place islands at the center of the story, highlighting Indigenous and Black voices and the work of communities taking action for local and global climate justice. At once serious and playful, well-researched and lavishly designed, Sea Change is a stunning exploration of the climate and our world’s coastlines. Full of immersive storytelling, scientific expertise, and rallying cries from island populations that shout with hope— “We are not drowning! We are fighting!”—this atlas will galvanize readers in the fight against climate change and the choices we all face.Christina Gerhardt is Associate Professor at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, Senior Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, and former Barron Professor of Environment and the Humanities at Princeton University. Her environmental journalism has been published by Grist.org, The Nation, The Progressive, and the Washington Monthly.

Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean, Christina Gerhardt

California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline, Rosanna Xia

Tell Them, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner

High Water Line New Jersey, Princeton

The Heat Will Kill You First: Life And Death On A Scorched Planet, Jeff Goodell

Climate First 

The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration, Jake Bittle    

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John E. Drabinski hosts a conversation with Stefanie Dunning, Professor of English at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. The author of numerous essays on African American literature and culture, Stefanie has authored two books: Queer in Black and White: Interraciality, Same Sex Desire, and Contemporary African American Culture, published by Indiana University Press in 2009 and Black to Nature: Pastoral Return and African American Culture, published by University of Mississippi Press in 2021 and the occasion for our conversation today. In this conversation, we discuss the origins of the book, the importance of nature and plant life in thinking about African American literature and cultural production, and the complexities of afropessimism for theorizing the end of the world, the terms of beginning again, and the possibilities for imagining a different future.

ON THE WANDERING PATHS is Sylvain Tesson’s literary adventure and philosophical reflection during a three-month journey of solitude and personal contemplation while walking along vast stretches of mountain ranges and rivers, ancient bridges and villages, of France’s countryside. This exquisite chronicle through landscapes that continue to resist urbanization and technology is a thoughtful and thought-provoking glimpse into a poet’s adventurous life. Author Daniel Hornsby, who writes the Foreword to the new English translation from University of Minnesota Press, joins the Press’s Eric Lundgren in conversation.

Eric Lundgren is the Outreach and Development Manager at the University of Minnesota Press. His novel The Facades (Overlook Press) was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick and a finalist for the William Saroyan International Writing Prize. His writing has appeared in Tin House, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Boulevard, and The Millions, and a new story, "Actaeon at the Movies", is out in Post Road 39. 

Daniel Hornsby is the author of Via Negativa (Knopf) and Sucker (Anchor, February 2023). His stories and essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Bookforum, The Missouri Review, and Joyland.

This translation of On the Wandering Paths is published with the support of Villa Albertine, in partnership with the French Embassy.

In this episode, hosts Ian Grosz and Lise Olsen interview Isabella Maria Engberg about her PhD project, which discusses how environmental portrayals in scientific travel writing from the long nineteenth century have been developed. It considers works by three scientific authors who have benefited greatly from what they have seen, gathered, and understood from their travels and have, with their scientific and literary output, contributed greatly towards humanity’s understanding of ecology. These authors and their travel narratives include Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, During the Years 1799-1804 (1814-29), Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle (second edition, 1845), and Ernst Haeckel’s Indische Reisebriefe (English: A Visit to Ceylon, 1883). The project investigates how journey narratives, written at different times and in different contexts, portray the interrelatedness of humans, organisms, and the rest of the material world. It seeks to get to grip with the transnational networks of knowledge between these travelling naturalists, the tensions between the “exciting” drama of encounter and the “dry” description of natural phenomena as well as the distinctly literary imagination necessary to conceive ecology.

Bio
Isabella Maria Engberg is currently undertaking a PhD programme in Comparative Literature. She also studied her undergraduate degree, MA (Hons) English-German, at the University of Aberdeen. During these years, she enjoyed both internships and an exchange year in Germany. Her academic interests are the environmental humanities, nineteenth century culture, and the relationship between science and literature. She is currently on an archival stay from April until August 2022 at the University of Jena, Germany, where she works with materials in the previous private residence of Ernst Haeckel, “Villa Medusa”. These are relevant to investigate how Haeckel’s diary and field notes turned into his published travel narrative. Isabella is supervised by Dr Helena Ifill, Dr Tara Beaney, and Prof Catherine Jones.   

A conversation with Cajetan Iheka, Associate Professor in the English Department at Yale University, where his research and teaching focus on African and Caribbean literatures, ecocriticism, ecomedia, and world literature. He is the editor of the Modern Language Association Options for Teaching volume, Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media, and co-editor of African Migration Narratives: Politics, Race, and Space. He also serves as the deputy editor of African Studies Review, the multidisciplinary journal of the African Studies Association. In this conversation, we discuss the key concepts and arguments in the book about centering Africa in discourses on media ecologies, materiality, and infrastructure in the media studies and the environmental humanities. His book, African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics, the occasion for our conversation today, was published by Duke University Press in late-August 2021.  

In this episode, HWW's Assistant Director of Operation and PhD Futures Now co-host Peggy Brennan speaks to Dr. Yan Pang and Dr. Elja Roy about their experience collaborating on Grand Research Challenge grants and how the project has helped shape their careers inside and outside academia. For full audio transcript and related median files, please visit our website www.phdfuturesnow.org. 

Plastics have been a defining feature of contemporary life since at least the 1960s. Yet our proliferating use of plastics has also triggered catastrophic environmental consequences. Plastics are derived from petrochemicals and enmeshed with the global oil economy, and they permeate our consumer goods and their packaging, our clothing and buildings, our bodies and minds. In this first episode of a two-part series, contributors to the volume LIFE IN PLASTIC: ARTISTIC RESPONSES TO PETROMODERNITY discuss plasticity and myth, stretchy superheroes, how plastic became gendered, plastic as a colonizing force, plastic in art and everyday life, and more. Featuring Caren Irr, Lisa Swanstrom, Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor, and Daniel Worden.

Caren Irr is a professor of English at Brandeis University and author of Toward the Geopolitical Novel, Pink Pirates, and The Suburb of Dissent.

Lisa Swanstrom is an associate professor of English at the University of Utah, coeditor of Science Fiction Studies, and author of Animal, Vegetable, Digital.

Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor is professor of English and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Pennsylvania State University. She is author of Postmodern Utopias and co-curator of Plastic Entanglements.

Daniel Worden is associate professor of interdisciplinary humanities at the Rochester Institute of Technology and author of Masculine Style, editor of The Comics of Joe Sacco, and coeditor of Oil Culture and Postmodern/Postwar—and After.

Works and people referenced in the episode:

Catherine Malabou

Roland Barthes

Through the Arc of the Rain Forest by Karen Tei Yamashita

The Drought by J.G. Ballard

Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters

Covehithe by China Miéville

Artist Pinar Yoldas

Plastic by Doug Wagner and Daniel Hillyard

Great Pacific (comic, 16-issue series)

The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

Friendship as method and medium is the heart of this conversation between Marina Zurkow and Una Chaudhuri, artists-academics behind "Dear Climate," a New York-based art collective that engages with climate change through public installations, design, experimental pedagogies, and playful toolkits for multispecies survival. Marina and Una share stories of early teaching in the field of Animal Studies, arriving at the right name and mode of address for the collective, and the many friendships that have deepened their shared practice and aesthetico-political commitments to multispecies worlds over the last decade.

Two rivers situate our conversation with two friends, poet/artist Cecilia Vicuña and art historian/curator Sarah Lookofsky. El Río Mapocho begins in the Andes Mountains and runs through the city of Santiago, Chile where Cecilia was born, while the River Akerselva begins in Maridal Lake and flows through waterfalls and former industrial areas of Oslo where Sarah recently moved. What might we learn to hear if we attend to the interweaving languages of these ancient waters and the many lives, joys, brutalities, and deaths they carry, remember, and resist? In this episode, Cecilia and Sarah talk about multispecies connection, histories of contamination and colonialism, quantum co-evolution, listening with fingers, dancing with mussels, speaking with red wing thrushes, and the "explosive commitment to the beauty of being alive."
 
ceciliavicuna
sarahlookofsky

Lesley Green, anthropologist and science studies scholar in Cape Town, discusses her new book Rock | Water | Life: Ecology and Humanities for a Decolonial South Africa (Duke/Wits Press 2020). Green develops an ecopolitical approach to critically engage with South Africa's history of racial oppression and environmental extraction, paying close attention to water conflicts, natural gas fracking, baboon management, sewage, soil, and land restitution. Emphasizing the "relation," Green calls for a paradigm shift that requires collaboration, experimentation, pedagogy, and laughter.

How might humanists, social scientists, and natural scientists do "research that matters and matters politically" in the Anthropocene? 
Lesley Green is an anthropologist and science studies scholar based in Cape Town who invites us to inhabit the diverse ecologies, violent colonial histories, neoliberal logics, and possible futurities from within South Africa. Emphasizing the "relation," Green proposes a critical paradigm shift that requires collaboration, experimentation, pedagogy, and laughter.

Sir Jonathan Bate has spent much of his life living with William Shakespeare — he's dedicated his career to better understanding the work of the Bard. Now the British academic is asking how Shakespeare's work might help us to save the planet.

Also, we hear an extract from Elena Kats-Chernin's new work for Sydney Philharmonia Choirs' 100th birthday and find out how Brisbane-based company The Good Room craft crowdsourced submissions into complex and emotional theatre.

ASHLEY DAWSON talks about "extreme", or urban densities like New York City, where social inequalities and uneven effects of colonial violence and capitalist development are increasingly exacerbated by extreme weather and environmental degradation. He calls on the power of storytelling to radically imagine different futures.

Dawson works across the fields of postcolonial studies, environmental humanities, and climate justice. He is a professor of English at CUNY Graduate Center and College of Staten Island, and leads a Climate Action Lab.