A different path in nature

Humanities Watch: Tell us about why you created your site: what was the impetus behind its creation? How did it evolve?

The origin of this project is this fear that what’s beautiful about life is being slowly contracted into nothing. The climate crisis is not the only example of this, but it is perhaps the most salient. Currently, we are experiencing the hottest temperatures the earth has known in the past 125,000 years. If we persist down our present course, it feels like natural beauty itself will undergo an almost unthinkable contraction. It’s not just that we will witness the elimination of animals and plants that make our world beautiful. It’s also that what natural beauty remains, suddenly the subject of a new form of scarcity, will be reserved for our economic elite. We saw this frighteningly augured just this week, as we were preparing to give this interview. As part of a spending bill, there was a push by members of Congress to sell and privatize vast swaths of public land. Even though it’s since been removed from the spending bill, the very fact of its introduction raises, for us, what is an almost oppressively frightening question: what if nature, one of the few escapes remaining in our profoundly inegalitarian society, becomes something that is largely locked behind a paywall? What if the beauty of nature contracts and increasingly becomes the reserve of the economic elite with the worsening of climate change and the socioeconomic shifts that come with it?

We wanted to explore the ways life transforms and adapts to our era of global crisis, drawing on the experiences of our writers. How does our contemporary world make and unmake us? What constitutes a good life in this era of crisis? If it is not the ability to buy and consume as much as we want, as our culture continues to insist even in the face of our ecological devastation, then what is it? The journal is a place for these questions.

HW: You say your aim is “to create a space for undergraduate students to envision and articulate a good life at this moment of global crisis.” What do you imagine this space to look like? 

What seems to go against logic is our continued atomization in the face of our global crises. This atomization is the locus of crisis normalization. How this happens is obviously complicated, but one of the ways we conceive it is in thinking about doom-scrolling. We read something scary—for example, the fact that we’re experiencing the hottest temperatures known on earth in the past 125,000 years—and then we keep scrolling and encounter another scary fact about something else. This persists until we put the phone down or get distracted by something that doesn’t scare us, an advertisement or maybe an Instagram post. Then life proceeds along the same patterns that have generated the crises in the first place. What fear we had in doom-scrolling isn’t transformed into solidarity but is instead dissipated through the factures endemic in a culture that insists on individualism and consumerism as the highest human goods. We do this again and again and suddenly we’re living lives where the latest fact about our ecological devastation is just something sandwiched between advertisements and “content” designed for our consumption. This process of crisis normalization carries with it feelings of loss and grief. The future seems foregone, lost to a process that was never in our control to begin with.

What we want to do with our journal is to offer, in a very small way, an alternative to this everyday reality. We want to create a community that has a common good: an alternative to crisis; a different path; a better world. This means inviting and publishing work that helps us understand a world whose harms seem to emanate from everywhere and nowhere and work that tries to articulate possible alternatives to our current courses of destruction.

HW: How do you see your site as entertaining an interdisciplinary playing field? How do you see the humanities intersecting with areas outside the traditional humanities? 

In thinking about starting the journal, one of the main conversations we had was about community. We felt that community, in education, often exists in these silos, where you’re participating in something because you belong to a certain discipline or because you’ve attained a certain level in our hierarchical divisions. When Maci and Chandler organized the “Beautiful World, Where Are You?” conference at Duke University this past spring, one of the things that worked really well about that is that it tried to look past these bureaucratic and hierarchical divisions. It invited papers from all college students in the area, regardless of discipline, and so there were papers about architecture, conservation, and King Lear, and by students from Piedmont Community College, NC State, UNC, and Duke.

With the journal, we wanted to take that idea and expand it. We are, of course, inviting submissions from college students across disciplines and institutions in North Carolina. But we’re also building an editorial team that attempts to represent as many colleges and universities in the state as possible. Right now, our editorial team represents six colleges and universities in the state, and by the end of summer, when we’ll announce our editors, we hope to have representation from ten NC colleges and universities. These editors from different institutions represent a wide range of disciplines, too.

We felt like this was necessary because our crises know no disciplinary divisions, and because we do live in this atomized culture where space is coded according to prestige and specialty and everything is algorithmically filtered to fit individual preference.

HW: What types of contributions do you seek? Can you provide an example or two? When do you expect the first volume to appear?  

We welcome anything that addresses our culture of omnicrisis or that articulates an alternative to our current trajectory. We want this to be as inclusive as possible. Just because someone is working on Julian of Norwich, for example, that doesn’t mean that person doesn’t have something to say about our world. On the contrary, if you’re working with someone like Julian, who lived in fourteenth-century England and under a completely different set of values than are dominant now, the very alienness of the material has extraordinary power against our cultural norms.

In the run up to the first volume, which will be released in Spring 2026, we will release a few featured pieces, one of which is by Maci and another is by Elizabeth Ess, one of our editors at Piedmont Community College. Written during her time living and working in the Peruvian Amazon this summer, Maci’s piece is organized formally as a catalog of butterflies in the Amazon but is written as a more personal and philosophical meditation on our places within the natural world. Elizabeth’s is a free verse poem inspired by her personal form of escape from the chaos that consumes modern society.  While sitting in the nature that surrounds her home, Elizabeth explores how we may escape from society’s fast-paced culture, the cycle of which contradicts our natural place in the world.

For more about the site and the journal, see here.