CHE - Center for Culture, History, and Environment

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CHE-Center for Culture, History, and Environment is a multidisciplinary research center at UW-Madison CHE is the proud sponsor of Edge Effects Magazine.

Website: EdgeEffects.net
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10/08/2026

“This cluster of nature poems depicts encounters with birds, bugs, and bark that feel precious to me, both ecologically and personally. In the grand scheme of natural cycles, our human lives—pain, empathy, bumbling efforts, love, etc.—are relatively small. “

Poetry offers a window into the ecological, personal, and emotional. Today on Edge Effects, poet Jessica Holmes attends to the profound significance of seemingly small encounters, finding in birds, bugs, flowers, and trees a space to explore ecological wonder.

Read more: https://edgeeffects.net/a-magnificent-smallness-poems/

10/06/2026

“El triunfo del azúcar refinado producido a escala industrial en la Colombia de mediados del siglo XX captura la aceleración moderna del Plantationoceno a pesar de la persistencia de visiones alternativas sobre los futuros agrícolas.”

Hoy, en Translation Tuesday, Timothy Lorek compara dos calendarios históricos de Colombia que ofrecen visiones contrapuestas del presente de las plantaciones y de los futuros agrícolas.

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“The triumph of industrial-scale refined sugar in mid-century Colombia captures the modern acceleration of the Plantationocene despite the persistence of competing visions of agricultural futures.”

Today on Translation Tuesday, Timothy Lorek compares two calendars from Colombia that offer competing visions of plantation presents and agricultural futures.

Leer más | Read more: https://edgeeffects.net/siguiendo-el-tiempo-con-los-calendarios-de-plantacion-colombianos/

10/01/2026

“The point is that in its afterlife, the American chestnut is no longer a stately tree of towering grandeur and uncommon bounty. The blight has dethroned the chestnut as forest god, demoting it from charismatic megaflora to tenacious shrub, repeatedly cut down by the blight and resurging from its roots.”

Extinction unfolds across multiple temporalities and is mediated through a variety of cultural forms. Today on Edge Effects, Yota Batsaki combines personal reflection, literary analysis, and environmental history to unpack the afterlives of the chestnut that once dominated the overstory of the American landscape.

Photo: John Reed

Read more: https://edgeeffects.net/plant-afterlives/

09/24/2026

“Unless communities and environmental justice groups fundamentally challenge extractivism, the green and digital transitions will be built, quite literally, on the open wounds of places like Mount Ida.”

Mount Ida, Turkey, is becoming a sacrifice zone for copper extraction driven by global green and digital transitions. Today on Edge Effects, Zeynep Nettekoven explores how the struggle of local communities and environmental activists reveals the ecological and cultural costs of extractivism

Read more: https://edgeeffects.net/the-open-wounds-of-mount-ida/

09/17/2026

”It is no surprise that if wildlife is perceived to belong in mythical wild landscapes, they are also perceived as most out of place in our disenchanted cities. We do not recognize the wild. But we do experience nuisance, or shame and sadness, when nonhumans leverage human-built infrastructure.”

Why do we think wildlife encounters are more authentic when they happen in remote places? Today on Edge Effects, Mark Rademaker explores how our ideas about “wild” nature are shaped by an idea of wilderness that overlooks the wildlife thriving alongside us in our everyday lives.

Read more: https://edgeeffects.net/hornbills-on-the-doorstep/

09/10/2026

“Saharanism furnishes a conceptual tool for understanding what happens in deserts and why these spaces, which represent 33% of the land area of planet Earth, are treated as a category separate from discourses about environmentalism, law, life, morality, and experimentation.”

What happens when we imagine the desert as empty? Today on Edge Effects, Gustavo Sanchez-Bachman talks with Brahim El Guabli about his book Desert Imaginations: A History of Saharanism and Its Radical Consequences. Their conversation explores “Saharanism” and the people and ecologies obscured by dominant desert imaginaries.

Read more: https://edgeeffects.net/saharanism-and-the-myth-of-the-empty-desert-five-questions-for-brahim-el-guabli/

09/03/2026

“Together this list suggests that the 'weird' offers a useful mode of ecological attention—a way of noticing forms of agency, contradictions, and unlikely interdependencies with the more-than-human world. But perhaps above all, the weird can remind us that art has long made visible our enmeshment in larger, living systems no matter how strange those environments may be.”

Today on Edge Effects, faculty across academic disciplines recommend books, songs, and films that explore the polluted, uncanny, planetary, satirical, and otherwise non-normative dimensions of what we’re calling the “ecological weird.”

Read more: https://edgeeffects.net/faculty-favorites-encountering-the-ecological-weird/

09/01/2026

“Mientras la expansión colonial avanzaba sobre nuevos territorios considerados ‘exóticos,’ la búsqueda de especímenes tropicales y subtropicales aumentaba en respuesta a la demanda de productos imperiales en la propia Europa.”

Hoy en Translation Tuesday: Siguiendo el rastro de las orquídeas en Cosecha de huesos, una novela de Edwidge Danticat, se revelan complejas tramas de cuidado, violencia y el poder perdurable de la imaginación colonial.

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“As colonial expansion continued to open up exotic locations, the hunt for rare tropical and subtropical specimens escalated in response to the appetite for imperial products at home in Europe.”

Today on Translation Tuesday: Following orchids in The Farming of Bones, a novel by Edwidge Danticat, exposes tangled webs of care, violence, and the lasting power of the colonial imagination.

Leer más | Read more: https://edgeeffects.net/detras-de-la-belleza-de-las-orquideas-siglos-de-violencia/

07/30/2026

“If we take the idea of normal accidents seriously, derailment represents a probable outcome of the system operating as intended.”

Shocking events like the 2023 Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, often get framed as just that–shocking. Today on Edge Effects, Alex George and Kimberley Thomas reframe the incident around normal accident theory to emphasize the structural problems at the heart of the train industry.

Read more: https://edgeeffects.net/is-the-disaster-in-east-palestine-ohio-a-new-normal/

07/28/2026

“Part of doing interdisciplinary work for me is also about undisciplining your mind. Now I’ve spent so much time in feminist studies, but my biological training runs very deep. Part of interdisciplinary work is also letting your imagination run wild to ask: How are we where we are? How else might we study?”

Laleh Ahmad speaks with Banu Subramaniam about her recent book Botany of Empire: Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism. This week's installment of Edge Effects' Botanical Imagination series explores how colonialism shaped botany and considers how we might imagine alternative futures.

Read/listen: https://edgeeffects.net/banu-subramaniam/

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Science Hall, Room M390, 550 N. Park Street
Madison, WI
53706

Website

https://che.nelson.wisc.edu/

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