Dave Foreman's Books of the Big Outside, Fall 1991
Dave Foreman’s Books of the Big Outside is a catalog of books, poetry, music, and material pertaining to what he calls the “Big Outside,” compiled for “wilderness defenders.”
Dave Foreman’s Books of the Big Outside is a catalog of books, poetry, music, and material pertaining to what he calls the “Big Outside,” compiled for “wilderness defenders.”
Matthew MacLellan argues that Garrett Hardin’s primary object of critique in his influential “The Tragedy of the Commons” is not the commons or shared property at all—as is almost universally assumed by Hardin’s critics—but is rather Adam Smith’s theory of markets and its viability for protecting scarce resources.
Martin’s article explores the rise of the line graph and an associated statistical method, linear regression, in ecology, contending that not only has ecologists’ use of linear regression shaped understandings of nature, but ecologists’ understandings of nature have also shaped their use of linear regression.
Shannon Cram explores the slippery subjectivities of nuclear waste and nature at Washington State’s Hanford Nuclear Reservation, examining how this space is framed as both pristine habitat and waste frontier. She examines Hanford’s biological vector control program through the fruit fly and discusses how vector control uses instances of nuclear trespass to articulate the boundary between contaminated and uncontaminated. She concludes that nature is being recruited to do what the U.S. Department of Energy cannot: solve Hanford’s nuclear waste problem.
Greear examines the contemporary trend toward de-industrialized and decentralized production and its implications for ecological sustainability. He suggests we can understand the potential positive ecological implications of such trends by reconceptualizing “incomplete information” in markets, which is often understood as a key way in which markets fail to solve or forestall environmental problems.
In this article for a Special Section on “Inheriting the Ecological Legacies of Settler Colonialism,” Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw and Fikile Nxumalo relate raccoon-child-educator encounters to consider how raccoons’ repeated boundary-crossing and the perception of raccoons as unruly subjects might reveal the impossibility of the nature/culture divide. They do so through a series of situated, everyday stories from childcare centers in Canada.
In this article for a Special Section on “Inheriting the Ecological Legacies of Settler Colonialism,” Alexander R. D. Zahara and Myra J. Hird explore the ways in which western and Inuit cosmologies differentially inform particular relationships with the inhuman, and “trash animals” in particular. They compare vermin control practiced in Canada’s waste sites with the freedom of ravens to explore waste sites within Inuit communities, arguing that waste and wasting exist within a complex set of historically embedded and contemporaneously contested neo-colonial structures and processes.
In this review essay, Jennifer Hamilton responds to Michael Marder’s book, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (2013), exploring three of Marder’s concepts, plant “nourishment,” “desire” and “language,” through readings of Gabrielle de Vietri’s installation The Garden of Bad Flowers (2014), the story of Daphne from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 CE) and Alice’s encounter with talking flowers in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871).
In this commentary, Stefan Helmreich considers how Hokusai’s famous woodblock print, The Great Wave, has recently been leveraged into commentaries upon the Anthropocene, and how the image has been adapted to speak to the contemporary human-generated global oceanic crisis.
In this Special Commentary Section titled “Replies to An Ecomodernist Manifesto,” edited by Eileen Crist and Thom Van Dooren, Bruno Latour explores the political import of the notion of “ecomodernism.”