Nature Archives - Public Seminar

Activism

On “Reconnecting with Nature” as a City-Dweller

An education in wheelbarrows, pin oaks, and herring gulls

September 10, 2025 • by Chrisaleen Ciro

A few weeks into my time here in NYC back in the fall of 2021, I volunteered at an urban farm in East Harlem. The crew of volunteers was diverse—some of us had experience growing food and others didn’t. At the time, I had worked on farms and market gardens ...

On “Reconnecting with Nature” as a City-Dweller

Disability

Wilderness, Urban Landscapes, and Biocapacity

In an excerpt from The Architecture of Disability, the author considers the performance of disability in so-called “nature”

October 25, 2023 • by David Gissen

Challenging the physical inaccessibility of national parks might be reimagined as an opportunity to demonstrate the artifice of American nature more broadly. If disability rights are ultimately human rights, then the ideas presented here suggest new, unimagined alliances....

Wilderness, Urban Landscapes, and Biocapacity

Climate & Ecology

A Globe, Clothing Itself with Ears

Stories of speaking with animals are as old as human history

November 3, 2022 • by Karen Bakker

Human ambivalence about animal language persists and is linked with our uncertainty about human status: Are we one animal among others, or does something truly set us apart? Debates over animal language are a touchstone for human uncertainties about our role in the cosmos....

Climate & Ecology

Why We Need to Care About Animal Ethics in a Time When Humans Suffer Too

Alice Crary and Lori Gruen share their “critical animal theory” in a conversation with Public Seminar

September 14, 2022 • by Claire Potter, Lori Gruen and Alice Crary

The division between “humans” and “animals” is not a natural division, but a conceptual one that privileges humans over animals, and not even all humans. This divide operates in a way that justifies the oppression of animals and humans thought to be “closer” to animals, which has often meant women, ...

Climate & Ecology

Crisis / Orangutans

A case study excerpted from Animal Crisis

September 14, 2022 • by Lori Gruen and Alice Crary

From 2000 to 2015, 150,000 orangutans on Borneo died as their forest homes were destroyed and they became exposed to humans. And orangutans aren’t the only creatures to suffer from this massive destruction....

New York City

Reimagining Nature—The High Line Experiment

How plant design preserved the High Line for a city craving natural space

August 17, 2022 • by Yasmin Arquiza

Meandering around the gardens, it is easy to imagine the trees, shrubs, and ferns just sprouting between the rusty tracks. In reality, it takes a lot of effort from the gardening team, working behind the scenes, to maintain the pastoral ambience. ...

Reimagining Nature—The High Line Experiment

Multi-Verse

Multi-Verse Episode 3. Mikko Harvey: “Let the World Have You”

On cats and bear traps. We hope the animals are not offended.

July 13, 2022 • by Evangeline Riddiford Graham

In Episode 3 of Multi-Verse, poet Mikko Harvey reads and discusses his poem “Let the World Have You” with host Evangeline Riddiford Graham. ...

Feature

GIDEST: Wetness Everywhere

Water, fluidity, and scarcity

October 3, 2017 • by GIDEST

GIDEST is a Mellon-funded research institute based at The New School that incubates transdisciplinary research at the intersection of social theory, art, and design. As well as our faculty, artist-in-residence, and doctoral fellows’ programs, we run a series of biweekly public seminars that feature both prominent and emerging scholars and practitioners. ...

Science & Technology

Virno on Human Nature

July 22, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

One of the central arguments of Paolo Virno’s book When Word Becomes Flesh (Semiotext(e), 2015) is that the conditions of possibility of experience can themselves be experienced. There are no transcendental conditions that are ‘out of the frame’ as it were. The transcendental or ontological “are humbly placed within the world ...