Nature and Culture

This article aims to bring to mind the material narrative of the planet, working on the fluctuation of scale between the vastness of the earth’s mantle and the direct encounter with sandstone rocks on its surface. It is an auto-ethnographic investigation into a suburban garden and the stones therein. This article uses “noticing” as a methodological principle of engagement with the world, examining the intra-actions of human activity and movement and planetary agency. The focus is on sedimentary rock, residues of an ambulant underground flow from a nearby quarry, and how they imbricate the garden with the modern socioeconomic processes of suburbanization, colonization, and extractivism. The article thus provokes a rethinking of “ground” as transient and ephemeral yet entangled with the cultural politics of cultivation.

This article engages with sustainable tourism as an excessive form of consumption that needs to be further interrogated through “limitarianism,” a philosophy and ethics for an upper limit of wealth. It critically examines the role of sustainable tourism in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) 30 × 30 initiative, which aims to conserve 30 percent of the Earth by 2030. Sustainable tourism is often presented as a financial mechanism for local conservation and cultural preservation that benefits Indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLCs). However, this disregards structural issues, including the wealthy’s contribution to climate change, global biodiversity reduction, and socioeconomic inequalities (including through land dispossessions), while often leading to a further marginalization of IPLCs. To fully address these issues, limitarianism should be interrogated to achieve redistribution and justice.

It is a mistake to characterize tracts of public land as mere quantities of physical space. Parcels of public land are complex artifacts comprised of individual and cultural perceptions, ecological factors, technologies, legal-institutional stipulations, and socioeconomic relationships. This article is an interdisciplinary interpretive analysis of scholarship dealing with the concepts of self, place, and political agency and their application in US multiple-use land policy and planning. Given the centrality of political agency within the liberal democratic tradition, I argue that recognition of self- and place-constructs may be elemental to the enactment of legitimate land management policy regimes and explore how these constructs can be better reflected in the policy process, focusing on Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service land use planning activities.

This study presents an analysis of the German discourse on peatland rewetting based on a data corpus of 1,957 newspaper articles published between January 2019 and July 2023. Because of the large scope of the analysis, we used structural topic modeling (STM) to identify the regionality of discursive features and meaning structures. We divided the corpus into four discourse strands (national, northeast, northwest, south) and show that the distribution of topics differs significantly between these strands. However, we also present a hegemonic discourse pattern of peatland rewetting as a climate protection strategy. Moreover, we contribute to a deeper understanding of barriers to the large-scale rewetting of drained and agriculturally utilized peatlands in Germany by identifying two dispositives: the drainage dispositive and a nature conservation dispositive, shaping peatland-related practices and activities.

Stephen Most. 2024. River of Renewal: Myth and History in the Klamath Basin. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press.

James Scott. 2025. In Praise of Floods: The Untamed River and the Life it Brings. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press.

Christopher Morris. 2024. Biotraffic: Medicines and Environmental Governance in the Afterlives of Apartheid. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Alex K. Gearin. 2024. Global Ayahuasca: Wondrous Visions and Modern Worlds. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.