The spectre of “the elements” currently haunts the environmental humanities: this quasi-intuitive idea seems well on its way to replace Raymond Williams’ lamented word “Nature”.[1] Indeed, if “Nature” problematically relies on an essentialist dualist framework,[2] and even “environment” arguably seems to refer to that what surrounds the human, one of the allures of the turn […]
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“Diego Rivera, Water, Origin of Life, 1951” © Joaquín Martínez 2012 Flickr under CC BY 2.0 We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.[1] At the time it was written, the assertion of the universal equality of man found in the United States Declaration of Independence (1776) reflected the emancipatory spirit of a […]
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In his essay ‘Butterfly Crossings’, anthropologist Anand Pandian observes how the monarch butterfly, Danaus Plexippus, gradually became a symbol in the protests in North America for the rights of undocumented migrants who try to cross the border between Mexico and the United States: ‘Monarchs are celebrated for their migration. But it isn’t simply how far […]
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