Edge Effects

Mount Ida (Kazdağları), on the northwest Aegean coast of Turkey, is under attack by energy and mining companies due to its rich mining reserves, primarily of gold, silver, and copper. In the last ten years, the state approved 85% of the 423 project proposals in the region. Today, 79% of the Mount Ida region is licensed to various mining companies.

It was once the royal abode of kings and aristocrats. Then the center of the colonial administration and its defenses. Now, the historic Fort Canning Park in downtown Singapore provides a small space of green relief for dwellers of the adjacent business district and visitors to the National Museum. Meticulously kept lawns blend with historic artifacts and diverse flora in this pleasant, but hardly natural, urban green space.

Desert Imaginations: A History of Saharanism and Its Radical Consequences (University of California Press, 2025) When you think of the word “desert,” you may (if you are not a desert dweller yourself) associate the word with images of an inhospitable space lacking water and nourishment for human beings. You may also think of what you’ve seen in movies or television shows: a skeleton at the base of a generic cactus, or a camel passing through a sandy waste.

What can an engagement with the “weird” tell us about our relationships with the more-than-human world?

Este ensayo fue traducido por María Ignacia Seguel Montoya. Original text in English. En 1787, una orquídea pulpito (Prosthechea cochleata) floreció tranquilamente bajo el cuidado del equipo botánico de Kew Gardens, en Londres. Este fue uno de los primeros registros del florecimiento de una orquídea importada en un vivero británico. Se podría decir que aquel florecimiento fue el precursor de una era de orquidelirio que acabaría apoderándose de Europa occidental.

On February 3, 2023, a Norfolk Southern train was rattling through the small town of East Palestine, Ohio, when an overheated bearing gave out and thirty-eight cars derailed. Twenty of these carried hazardous materials including vinyl chloride, ethylhexyl acrylate, ethylene glycol monobutyl ether, and isobutylene. After rejecting other options, local emergency officials conducted a controlled burn of the vinyl chloride, breaching the car to relieve pressure and burning its contents.

This podcast interview is the twentieth installment of the Botanical Imaginations series, which complicates, diversifies, and proliferates the stories we tell about plants.

This essay on the limits of translationand live art exhibits is thenineteenth installment of the Botanical Imaginations series, which complicates, diversifies, and proliferates the stories we tell about plants. Series editors: Laleh Ahmad, Tessa Archambault, Dylan Couch, Ellie Kincaid, Rebecca Laurent, Kayleigh Lobdell, Clare Michaud, Nicolás Felipe Rueda Rey Historically, Western philosophy has often placed humans at the center of meaning-making.

This essay on agroforestry and translation is the eighteenth installment of the Botanical Imaginations series, which complicates, diversifies, and proliferates the stories we tell about plants. Series editors: Laleh Ahmad, Tessa Archambault, Dylan Couch, Ellie Kincaid, Rebecca Laurent, Kayleigh Lobdell, Clare Michaud, Nicolás Felipe Rueda Rey We are in Brumadinho, a municipality in Brazil that was struck in January 2019 by the collapse of an iron ore tailings dam.

This podcast interview is the seventeenth installment of the Botanical Imaginations series, which complicates, diversifies, and proliferates the stories we tell about plants.