My paper examines Taiwan’s wetlands as thresholds between life and death through Chin-yuan Ke’s documentaries Ebb and Flow (2011) and Sea Spray (2022). It considers wetlands as ecological filters that unsettle modern binaries and host multispecies encounters. The paper shows how film and dance shape a storytelling politics that reframes grief for disappearing wetlands as a prompt for environmental awareness. By tracing these entangled coastal ecologies, the paper highlights how environmental humanities can connect scientific insight with cultural meaning to support wetland conservation in the Anthropocene.

By the mid-2030s, the Central German Mining District in eastern Germany is expected to see the end of brown coal mining. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores how the anticipated coal phase-out is entangled with the legacy of the post-socialist period following German reunification. It shows how these overlapping and often conflicting temporalities shape present-day life in the region. Phasing out coal is framed as progress toward a better future and as a corrective to the disruptions triggered by reunification. In this temporal configuration, the present emerges as a time of transformation. I conceptualise this present as a gap – a temporal and spatial condition shaped by the simultaneous presence of coal pasts and post-coal futures. The concept of the gap helps to reveal how disruptions and past-future entanglements in time structure the everyday experiences of those living in the Central German Mining District.

This visual essay showcases material from an exhibition displayed in Brussels in autumn 2024. The exhibition featured films created for the occasion by Bêka & Lemoine, as well as exhibits borrowed from the collections of Rotor, a Brussels-based collective research and design practice. These movies and objects were accompanied by wall texts and captions, which are reproduced here in an adapted version. The exhibition presented sites where materials are produced, transformed, reused or disposed of within a 200 km radius of Brussels. It addressed the complexity that characterises the organisation of material flows in the current economy. The stills from Bêka & Lemoine’s films and Rotor’s texts intertwined to create narratives that address various issues, such as the scale of industrial activity, the relationship to work, the role of machines, waste management and the impact of material movement on the landscape.

In the Morning Star series (2020-), Karl Ove Knausgård explores blurred boundaries between life and death, challenging traditional views of mortality. This study uses T. Todorov’s theory of the fantastic and V. Despret’s existentially pluralist philosophy of the dead to examine how the dead in Knausgård’s novels defy binary categorizations. Through narrative techniques e.g. tying and severing of narrative knots, the series creates a space of ambiguity where the dead influence the living, inviting readers to confront questions about reality, agency, and interconnectedness.

This article examines how the faint, persistent hum of groundwater pumps exposes the limits of industrial clean-up. Focused on efforts to manage groundwater contaminated by a century of coal-based chemical industrialization in Bitterfeld-Wolfen, it draws on sonic methods and the concept of transmediation to explore how sound and water unsettle the illusion of containment. Attuning to these peripheral vibrations offers a way of sensing pollution as ongoing, relational, and irreducible – within what the paper frames as a toxic common.

A practice-led collaboration between James Muriuki and Constance Smith, “Excavation | Elevation” examines the excavations and extractions that make high-rise architecture possible. Focusing on the socio-geologies of Nairobi, it follows the city’s urban transformation above and below ground. As fields become tower blocks, excavation and extraction, quarrying and land speculation underpin new high-rise skylines. But horizons can be fragile: buildings collapse and construction sites play host to new urban ecologies, as the underneath and the surface shape each other.

These notes gather the scenes of a single day around a coal mine. In the hinterlands of western Germany, thousands of protesters rallied in January 2023 to convey their opposition to the extension of the mine and etched the name of a village – Lützerath – into the collective memory of climate protests. These notes linger in the very moment of the village’s passing and give way to the bewilderment of a peripatetic fieldworker thrown into the turmoil that flared up when the law arrived to disband what was left of a multi-year occupation, until its last devotees – two people barricaded in a self-dug tunnel – would have been dragged off. These notes are fragments on the conundrums of engaging with underground phenomena, on the fallibility of ideas of representation, and on the fragility of writing about conflicts over coal, climate, and communities.

Review of: Brito, C. (2023). Humans and Aquatic Animals in Early Modern America and Africa. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 270 pp.

By questioning the dichotomy between epistemology ‘from above’ and ‘from below’, this article presents a multidimensional and multisensory analysis of the Venetian Lagoon ecosystem. It first investigates remote sensing techniques applied to Venetian coastal management, artisanal fishery, and archaeology, tracing the evolution of environmental remote sensing through the work of geographer Evelyn L. Pruitt, who coined the term. The focus then shifts to the cormorants inhabiting the lagoon, whose movement between air and water in search of food – sparking conflicts with fish farmers and anglers – reframes the divide between the world above and the one below the water’s surface, offering a more-than-human perspective on the so-called vertical turn.

This paper analyses how Big Tech and global consultancy firms are asserting control over carbon removal certification and governance through infrastructure solutions and technical standards. We argue that defining gaps in the underground constitutes a global takeover of material sovereignty, encompassing both knowledge and geological formations. We unearth Big Tech’s strategies of infra-solutionism to demonstrate, drawing on the work of inhuman geographer Kathryn Yusoff, how this takeover reinforces geological grammars and essentialises racialised and sexualised categories that disconnect us from the Earth. Drawing on queer poetry together with work of Marxist agronomist Amílcal Cabral we advocate for resistance to dominant geopower and form transnational solidarities against the cloud regime.