Les Beldo proposes thinking about nonhuman contributions to production, including those taking place at the microbiological level, as labor, and offers an ethnographic description of the lives of broiler chickens.
Content Index
Denis Byrne explores the 1880s reclamation of the Elizabeth Bay in Sydney Harbour, encountering historical influences such as sandstone wall constructions, buried objects, and colonial narratives. He argues in this article that archaeology has a role to play in bringing reclamations and other aspects of the Anthropocene into view.
In Episode 44 of Nature’s Past, Sean Kheraj speaks with environmental historians who attended the 2014 Second World Congress for Environmental History in Guimarães, Portugal.
Hornby draws attention to the work of Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, whose immersive installations aim to increase environmental awareness, arguing that Eliasson’s environments are fully orchestrated affairs that share the technologies and efforts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ militarization of climate control.
Looking to the work of Samuel R. Delaney, Sarah Ensor asks what it would mean to use the practice of cruising as a model for a new ecological ethic more deeply attuned to our impersonal intimacies with the human, nonhuman, and elemental strangers that constitute both our environment and ourselves.
Jeremy Brice draws on ethnographic fieldwork among winemakers in South Australia to look at pasteurisation as a way to unsettle the assumption that only individual organisms can be killed, rendering other sites and spaces of killing visible.
Considering the role of sound in shifting conceptions of the ocean, Ritts and Shiga explore how the US Navy mimicked whale, dolphin, and popoise communication techniques during the Cold War.
Margret Grebowicz argues that James Balog’s Extreme Ice Survey (EIS), in particular the time-lapse films of glaciers receding, presents a unique example of what Guy Debord calls the ”tautological” nature of spectacle, its capacity to serve as its own evidence at the same time as it becomes a mode of relation among people.
Elizabeth Callaway analyzes scientific literature on climate change, specifically from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to consider how scientific representations structure, articulate, and inform our experience of time.
In episode 43 of Nature’s Past, Sean Kheraj speaks with scholars from the Toronto Environmental History Network about the relationship between environmental scholarship and environmental activism.