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.
Content Index
Szerszynski’s article for the Special Commentary section of Environmental Humanities explores Pope Francis’s Laudato si’, particularly his call for a new “geo-spiritual formation.”
The Nordic Network for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies (NIES) promotes interdisciplinary environmental studies, especially work in the environmental humanities. The network is supported by NordForsk, and is based in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Iceland.
The aim of the Humanities for the Environment Observatories (HfE) is to identify, explore, and demonstrate the contributions that humanistic and artistic disciplines make to solving global social and environmental challenges.
Through a case study of the “invasive alien species” (IAS) narrative in South Africa, Susanna Lidström, Simon West, Tania Katzschner, M. Isabel Pérez-Ramos, and Hedley Twidle suggest that IAS oversimplifies the webs of ecological, biological, economic, and cultural relations to a simple “good” versus “bad” battle between easily discernible “natural” and “nonnatural” identities.
Affrica Taylor, Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, Sandrina de Finney, and Mindy Blaise edit and introduce a special section on “Inheriting the Ecological Legacies of Settler Colonialism.” The three essays that follow ponder the question of ecological inheritance in the settler colonial contexts of Canada and Australia, cognizant of the fact that settler colonialism remains an incomplete project.
In this article for a special section on “Inheriting the Ecological Legacies of Settler Colonialism,” Lesley Instone and Affrica Taylor engage with the figure of the Anthropocene as the impetus for rethinking the messy environmental legacies of Australian settler colonialism.
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 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.