Journal Articles by April Anson
Boundary2, 2023
QAnon's rallying cry of “the storm” on January 6 and thereafter articulates a structural taxonomy... more QAnon's rallying cry of “the storm” on January 6 and thereafter articulates a structural taxonomy of planetary scale and apocalyptic eschatology that pervades the environmental imaginaries of contemporary fascism. While they become visible only in times of emergency and states of exception, this essay argues that equal attention needs to be paid to expressions and operations of ecofascism in the mundane places and practices of everyday life. Expanding beyond the geographic and historical specificities of Nazism and its transatlantic dialogue with North American settler colonialism, this essay theorizes everyday ecofascism as an oiko-logics and oiko-nomics across borders, a transversal condition of deeply globalized, inextricably interconnected structures and systems.
Free online until June 2023: https://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article/50/1/137/343943/Green-Walls-Everyday-Ecofascism-and-the-Politics?guestAccessKey=aa5b0993-c00f-48d8-adf7-d42fdd89b3c8
Resilience: A Journal of Environmental Humanities, 2020
In a comparison of the 2016–17 Malheur occupation and the #NoDAPL movement at Standing Rock, this... more In a comparison of the 2016–17 Malheur occupation and the #NoDAPL movement at Standing Rock, this essay parses apocalyptic storytelling for problematic pivots around an emergency event. It argues that apocalyptic stories of single disastrous moments shelter the settler state of emergency, protecting the logic of the settler colonial capitalism’s continuous creation of and dependence upon the emergency event. This comparison clarifies the master metaphor lurking in the apocalyptic state of emergency—the ways apocalyptic emergency appeals reinforce the exclusionary violence and ecological devastation they so often seek to diagnose and disrupt. Ultimately, I offer the exigency of an event-versus-structure distinction in apocalyptic environmental storytelling. Following Indigenous and Black feminist futurisms’ invocations of apocalypse, which indict the structure of the settler state(s) of emergency, I suggest that stories that both summon and see beyond the structures of settler colonial capitalism’s past, present, and future ends of worlds constitute a state of emergence for an antiracist politics of storytelling in the context of climate change.
Western American Literature, 2019
In the United States what constitutes "public lands" has never been stable. Notions of the public... more In the United States what constitutes "public lands" has never been stable. Notions of the public and their commons were a fickle matter of political contest and power relations before the beginning of what is currently called America. This article takes two examples of contemporary debates over public lands as paradigmatic case studies for the ways apocalyptic appeals populate and naturalize the “settler commons” across the spectrum of US politics (Fortier). Through the comparison, it finds a convergence in what are often seen as irreconcilable differences between leftist environmentalisms and libertarian land-use logics. Apocalyptic depictions of the coming or in-progress collapse of the commons naturalize a space that both white environmentalists and white nationalists share. It then turns to apocalyptic imaginations of public space beyond the settler commons, concluding in a tentative example of the commons as indeed not static, not settled, but as an invitation to ongoing practice-based relationships of responsibility that require some of us--like me--to learn in public. Public lands, I find, are the spaces in which we are held accountable to very particular publics. In the patois of pithy prose, public lands are a verb.
Western American Literature, 2019
Like David Grann's 2017 Killers of the Flower Moon, John Joseph Mathews' 1934 Bildungsroman novel... more Like David Grann's 2017 Killers of the Flower Moon, John Joseph Mathews' 1934 Bildungsroman novel Sundown considers the Osage Reign of Terror. Both explore the countless murders of Osage for their oil rights as a gruesome example in a longer history of structural violence linking the settler state to resource extraction. Yet, Sundown's fiction goes beyond the realities Grann describes. Using the narrative genre most associated with the logics of individualism, modernity, and assimilation, Sundown stories survival beyond the end of the settler-state and its extraction economies. Matthews' novel follows the structure of a novel of formation, known as the Bildungsroman, yet departs from the genre’s assimilatory arc to expose, challenge, and prophecy beyond the genocidal logic typical to the individual-centered Euro-American genre. This essay explores how, though the Bildungsroman typically privileges conversation as a sign of "development," the novel instead turns to silences to anticipate what Stephanie LeMenager calls "the last gasp of oil aspirations" which seem so deafening today. Indeed, the novel regards silence as more than just a powerful marker of acquiescence to a culture of violence gasping for short-term gain. Sundown leverages Bildungsroman expectations to explore silence as a complex form of communication that can refuse to be moved, refuse to be speechless, refuse to go away. In this, it offers a rich historical antecedent for contemporary decolonial environmental and social justice movements.
Journal for the Study of Religion, 2011
The original contributions published in this special issue of the Journal for the Study of Religi... more The original contributions published in this special issue of the Journal for the Study of Religion are marked by scholarly commitments to rethinking methodology, epistemology, and a variety of analytical categories employed in feminist as well as ecofeminist work. Furthermore, contributors innovatively engage notions of agency, embodiment, and dualisms by interrogating a range of religious narratives and mythologies, and examining the various ways in which women’s lived experience is influenced by particular religious persuasions and norms.
“Mormonism, Biopolitics, and the Refuge of Terry Tempest Williams’s Ecofeminist Resistance.” Special Issue: Transforming Feminisms: Religion, Women, and Ecology. In Journal for the Study of Religion 24.2 (2011): 65-74.
Journal for the Study of Religion 24.2 (2011): 65-74
In her book Refuge, Terry Tempest Williams models defiance: rebellion from repressive religious d... more In her book Refuge, Terry Tempest Williams models defiance: rebellion from repressive religious dogma, and, ultimately, from the powers that force confrontation with the death of land and of the female body. Williams’ Mormon identity compels constant attempts to “rescue” her religious sympathies from oppressive historical medical and economic violence. Refuge exemplifies a struggle to unify and transform toxic cultural bias into a mode of resistance. Refuge centers its repudiations on a patriarchal Mormon tradition and what Foucault termed biopolitical racism. This article follows Williams’ endeavors to resolve Mormon principles with her ecofeminism, examining how this deep inquiry equipped her to find a refuge from biopolitical power in ecofeminist resistance.
Book Chapters by April Anson
The Routledge Companion to Gender and the American West, 2022
Contemporary ecofascist rhetoric metastasizes frontier metaphors to assimilate the realities of t... more Contemporary ecofascist rhetoric metastasizes frontier metaphors to assimilate the realities of the sixth great extinction, bringing the so-called environmental history of Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier into a fictional dystopia threatened by white genocide, habitat loss, and invasive species. However, at least one of Turner’s contemporaries contested these metaphors and generic methods. The 1927 western frontier romance Cogewea by Hum-Ishu-Ma, also known as Mourning Dove and Christine Quintasket of Okanagan and Arrow Lakes, transforms the frontier into a method of environmental history that refuses the extinction obsessions of the West. The novel infuses its western romance with lived realities, polyvocality, historical allusion, and Indigenous literary criticism that together document and disrupt the relationship between frontier fantasies and ecofascist environmentalism. While most scholarship cites Nazi Germany as the ideology’s origin point, Cogewea proves ecofascism has a deep American genealogy. This chapter follows from the novel’s first page, which diagnoses “death in the realms of storms and ghastly whiteness,” as it forecasts the lost white future fueling the fevers of frontier masculinity, the eugenic environmentalism of the novel’s time, and the white supremacy now sheltering systems responsible for super storms. Refusing these extinction imperatives, this chapter argues that the novel reworks the western frontier romance through Indigenous ecofeminist concerns of consent, revealing the genre’s relevance for not just the frontier and border wall, but where both spaces converge in contemporary climate concerns.
_From Sustainable to Resilient Cities: Global Concerns/Urban Efforts_. Research in Urban Studies. Emerald P, 2014. 289-313., Nov 25, 2014
The phenomenon of “tiny houses,” loosely defined as dwellings ranging between 65 and 120 square f... more The phenomenon of “tiny houses,” loosely defined as dwellings ranging between 65 and 120 square feet, has rapidly accumulated interest among economically and environmentally conscious individuals. The movement’s recent popularity highlights the commodification of sustainability in a market that continues to shelter economic and class privilege, despite that the movement itself emerges from a desire to consume less and contribute to community more.
Reading recent rhetoric surrounding the movement – with particular attention to the movement’s invocations of Henry David Thoreau – this essay examines the ways in which tiny house living contradicts its own rhetorical claims. However, in that contradiction, the movement has the potential to build a responsive environmental ethic as it focalizes dissonance between green-washing rhetoric and the complex realities of tiny house living. In fact, the experience of living in a tiny house may be even more Thoreauvian than the movement acknowledges with regard to issues of mobility and waste. Drawing from my position as builder, owner and inhabitant of a tiny house, as well as foundational sociological and environmental scholarship, this paper examines the tiny house movement’s privileged foundations but also investigates its potency for environmental and social justice issues, urban sustainability strategies, and land ethics.
https://books.google.com/books?id=m-G8BQAAQBAJ&pg=PA164&dq=From+Sustainable+to+Resilient+Cities:+Global+Concerns/Urban+Efforts_.+Research+in+Urban+Studies.+Bingley:+Emerald+P,&hl=en&sa=X&ei=3VrlVMLdF4HzoASl8IGICA&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
Henry David Thoreau in Context, Cambridge UP, 2017
Henry David Thoreau’s legacy has been cited as inspiring social experiments in “self-reliance,” s... more Henry David Thoreau’s legacy has been cited as inspiring social experiments in “self-reliance,” simplicity movements, and American environmentalism–all of which converge in the contemporary tiny house phenomenon. The tiny house movement is a trend that advocates living simply in small spaces and enthusiasts often refer to Thoreau as the movement’s patron saint. Written from the position of a tiny house builder and dweller, this chapter discusses the tiny house movement’s commitments, history, and practices and the relevant differences and similarities the movement holds to Thoreau’s life and writings.
Despite a mutual inheritance of romantic rhetoric and entanglement in systems they ostensibly reject, Thoreau and the tiny house movement share fundamental ideals that prize simplicity, the value of community, a desire to reject private property laws, and a will to transform cultures of consumption. The benediction of Thoreau may emphasize the privilege in American environmental movements like the tiny house craze, but his writings also inform radical possibilities for environmental action.
“The Paradox of Evil." _The Evil Body_. April Anson, ed. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2011. 209-219.
For medieval mystical women, the ability to simultaneously maintain two opposite concepts is requ... more For medieval mystical women, the ability to simultaneously maintain two opposite concepts is requisite for spiritual development - as both inferior and worthy, wholly evil while righteous. Spiritual quest thus necessitated an internalization and embodiment of paradox. In a close study of Julian of Norwich and Marguerite Porete, the feminine manifestation of contradiction allows for an exceptional identification and unification with the paradigmatic paradox of divine-in-human Christ. By virtue of gender, she can approach union with divinity. Integrating critics such as David Aers, Carolyn Bynum Walker and Nicholas Watson with Cleanth Brooks, this essay finds the medieval mystics embodiment and espousal of paradox to constitute their poetic practice. Not through rejection but embrace of her “evil” nature, the female mystic unifies both herself to Christ and all to God. In this way, the use of paradox as a figure of speech in the writing of Julian of Norwich and Marguerite Porete links their writing with their perception of their complicated role in the Church and in mystic discourse.
Evil, Women, and the Feminine investigates the simultaneous suspicion, divinity, purity, and mess... more Evil, Women, and the Feminine investigates the simultaneous suspicion, divinity, purity, and messy procreative paradigms that frequent conceptions of the feminine. The Evil, Women, and the Feminine’s interdisciplinary mission guides this collection, through subjects as diverse as ancient Greek medicine and contemporary female aggression, or the inextricably linked associations as witchcraft and the iconic femme fatale. Endeavoring to educate, expand, and embolden the struggle to deconstruct these conflations, the compilation serves penetrating dialogue about what it means to be human, in body and embodied.
Book Reviews by April Anson
Transmotion, 2019
In _The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism_, Gerald Horne once again earns his reputation as a nua... more In _The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism_, Gerald Horne once again earns his reputation as a nuanced transnational historian of race and class. In this his thirtieth book, Horne demonstrates that modernity arrived in the seventeenth century on the three horsemen of the apocalypse: slavery, white supremacy, and capitalism. Through a focus on English colonial projects, Horne proves these phenomena to be inseparable and interlocking, rather than, for instance, separate pillars of a single structure. Horne's deft archival work reveals rebellion to be a powerful and primary historical force, and clarifies whiteness as a category of convenience used to quell the vibrant cross-class and cross-racial revolutions which erupted throughout the seventeenth century-from England to Jamaica, Barbados to Boston-rebellions that reverberated through the formation of the United States forward to this day. In Horne's adroit analysis, seventeenth-century merchant class revolts against the monarchy, long thought to be paeans to democracy and liberalism, are shown to be inextricable from the violent enslavement of Africans and Native Americans.
Environmental History, 2018
Elemental Ecocriticism is a playful, dense, and at times dizzying experiment that enacts what it ... more Elemental Ecocriticism is a playful, dense, and at times dizzying experiment that enacts what it conceptualizes: the fecundity of thinking with the classical elements of earth, air, water, and fire. This kind of elemental thinking rejects the fixity implied by the periodic table, implicates and decenters the human, and refuses reduced-to-commodity worlds. The collection itself was conceived in this liveliness. It comes out of a collaboration traversing geographies, conferences, a postmedieval special issue, and a symposium. The contributors to this volume were asked, via blind selection, to make acquaintance with various forces of matter that materialize when thinking...(full text available through _Environmental History_).
Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, 2017
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
University of Toronto Quarterly, 2016
Conference Presentations by April Anson
American Apocalypse: The Whitewashing Genre of Settler Colonialism
*NOTE: final, published version is "'Master Metaphor': Environmental Apocalypse and the Settler S... more *NOTE: final, published version is "'Master Metaphor': Environmental Apocalypse and the Settler States of Emergency" (in _Resilience_ 8, 1, 2021, 60-81).
which can be found here: https://www.academia.edu/45569872/_Master_Metaphor_Environmental_Apocalypse_and_the_Settler_States_of_Emergency
Apocalypse can be a framework for lived experience that a genealogy of the literary genre can help us understand. Indeed, we know from Patrick Wolfe that settler-colonialism is not an event, but a structure taking land as its primary object, and Kyle Powys Whyte’s work reminds us that the structure of settler colonialism is a reality of past and ongoing apocalypse. The literary genre, however, typically regards the unsettling end of a (white) world. Yet, a genealogy of the literary genre shows that the genre has the potential for rupturing the exceptionalism inherent to its narrative emergency structure once situated in the context of the lived structural realities of settler colonialism. Moreover, a genealogy of American apocalypse helps us articulate the stakes of using the genre of apocalypse to narrate environmental crisis and the systems of violence coterminous with climate change.
American Apocalypse: Recovering The Genre of Settler-Colonialism, A Genealogy
*NOTE: final, published version is "'Master Metaphor': Environmental Apocalypse and the Settler S... more *NOTE: final, published version is "'Master Metaphor': Environmental Apocalypse and the Settler States of Emergency" (in _Resilience_ 8, 1, 2021, 60-81).
which can be found here: https://www.academia.edu/45569872/_Master_Metaphor_Environmental_Apocalypse_and_the_Settler_States_of_Emergency
On October 27, Ammon Bundy and associates were acquitted of charges stemming from their armed takeover of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Bundy justified his occupation through the apocalyptic threat of white genocide to warrant his declaration of martial law and a state of emergency. On the same day, with the visual drama of an apocalyptic dystopian film, a militarized police force arrested 141 water protectors in Standing Rock, North Dakota–an area ostensibly secured by treaty rights, Native sovereignty, and the state of emergency that the tribe declared in August 2016. The divergent consequences of each “occupation” are marked by racial difference best understood in a genealogy of the genre of American apocalypse. This genre centers on the invocation of a state of emergency, which has ties to settler-colonial structures of the frontier, sovereignty, and racial fear that continue to influence juries and the use of police force in 2016. Apocalypse can be a framework for lived experience that a genealogy of the literary genre can help us understand. Moreover, this genealogy helps us understand the stakes of using the genre of apocalypse to narrate environmental crisis.
The apocalypse genre’s close ties with American environmentalism did not begin with the idea of slow violence, the term climate change, or even Rachel Carson. American apocalypse, and its environmental sub-genre, must be understood in the context of the genocide of Native peoples in the Americas. Just as Patrick Wolfe tells us that settler-colonialism is not an event, but a structure taking land as its primary object, Kyle Powys Whyte’s work reminds us that the structure of settler colonialism is a past and ongoing apocalypse. I place the contemporary events at Malheur and Standing Rock in conversation with their literary forbearers. Examples can be found in Frederick Jackson Turner’s “Frontier Thesis” and the simultaneous refutation of Turner’s thesis in Simon Pokagon’s “Red Man’s Rebuke” and in contemporary works like Ian McEwan’s Solar and Thomas King’s The Back of the Turtle. These texts exist within a genealogy of American apocalypse that reveals that while the American apocalypse genre typically regards the unsettling end of a (white) world, the genre has the potential for rupturing the exceptionalism inherent to its narrative emergency structure once situated in the context of settler colonialism.
Public-Facing Scholarship by April Anson
Anti-Creep Climate Initiative Comics, 2022
Sometimes we wish we could solve the world’s problems with a *snap* of our fingers, even though w... more Sometimes we wish we could solve the world’s problems with a *snap* of our fingers, even though we know it’s never that simple: compound problems require compound solutions. Still, accelerating climate crisis and the unwillingness of global leaders to take meaningful climate action can breed nihilism – likely we’ve all witnessed it in students, colleagues, family members, and even ourselves. With such nihilism, though, sometimes comes a notion that mass violence could be a viable environmental solution. This specter of ecofascism looms in pop-cultural imaginations as a malevolent threat for some and a tantalizing fantasy for others.
Ecofascism, like fascism, never springs from nowhere. It creeps through our language, metaphors, visual media, narratives, and ideas of environmental health and security. This zine is intended to be a tool to help halt ecofascism wherever, whenever it may be creeping, by examining its roots, prompting reflection, and inspiring action.
The Anti-Creep Climate Initiative smashes ecofascist mythology, champions liberatory environmental futures, and has fun doing it! The Initiative was formed by April Anson, Cassie Galentine, Shane Hall, Alex Menrisky, and Bruno Seraphin. April Anson is an Assistant Professor of Public Humanities at San Diego State University, core faculty for the Institute for Ethics and Public Policy, and affiliate faculty in American Indian Studies. Cassie Galentine is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Oregon. Shane Hall is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Salisbury University. Alex Menrisky is an Assistant Professor of English and affiliate faculty in American Studies at University of Connecticut. Bruno Seraphin is a doctoral candidate in sociocultural Anthropology with a graduate minor in American Indian and Indigenous Studies at Cornell University.
Water Justice and Technology, 2022
Our report intervenes into the currently accelerating water transition by clarifying the politica... more Our report intervenes into the currently accelerating water transition by clarifying the political functions of “relief” in COVID-19 water policy agendas through grounded analyses of harmful technological solutions in local contexts throughout North America and Central America. We find that crisis-and-relief water transition policies, and their corresponding technological solutions, work against possibilities for water justice as they do not address the realities of racial capitalism and settler colonialism in water governance.
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Journal Articles by April Anson
Free online until June 2023: https://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article/50/1/137/343943/Green-Walls-Everyday-Ecofascism-and-the-Politics?guestAccessKey=aa5b0993-c00f-48d8-adf7-d42fdd89b3c8
Book Chapters by April Anson
Reading recent rhetoric surrounding the movement – with particular attention to the movement’s invocations of Henry David Thoreau – this essay examines the ways in which tiny house living contradicts its own rhetorical claims. However, in that contradiction, the movement has the potential to build a responsive environmental ethic as it focalizes dissonance between green-washing rhetoric and the complex realities of tiny house living. In fact, the experience of living in a tiny house may be even more Thoreauvian than the movement acknowledges with regard to issues of mobility and waste. Drawing from my position as builder, owner and inhabitant of a tiny house, as well as foundational sociological and environmental scholarship, this paper examines the tiny house movement’s privileged foundations but also investigates its potency for environmental and social justice issues, urban sustainability strategies, and land ethics.
https://books.google.com/books?id=m-G8BQAAQBAJ&pg=PA164&dq=From+Sustainable+to+Resilient+Cities:+Global+Concerns/Urban+Efforts_.+Research+in+Urban+Studies.+Bingley:+Emerald+P,&hl=en&sa=X&ei=3VrlVMLdF4HzoASl8IGICA&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
Despite a mutual inheritance of romantic rhetoric and entanglement in systems they ostensibly reject, Thoreau and the tiny house movement share fundamental ideals that prize simplicity, the value of community, a desire to reject private property laws, and a will to transform cultures of consumption. The benediction of Thoreau may emphasize the privilege in American environmental movements like the tiny house craze, but his writings also inform radical possibilities for environmental action.
Book Reviews by April Anson
Conference Presentations by April Anson
which can be found here: https://www.academia.edu/45569872/_Master_Metaphor_Environmental_Apocalypse_and_the_Settler_States_of_Emergency
Apocalypse can be a framework for lived experience that a genealogy of the literary genre can help us understand. Indeed, we know from Patrick Wolfe that settler-colonialism is not an event, but a structure taking land as its primary object, and Kyle Powys Whyte’s work reminds us that the structure of settler colonialism is a reality of past and ongoing apocalypse. The literary genre, however, typically regards the unsettling end of a (white) world. Yet, a genealogy of the literary genre shows that the genre has the potential for rupturing the exceptionalism inherent to its narrative emergency structure once situated in the context of the lived structural realities of settler colonialism. Moreover, a genealogy of American apocalypse helps us articulate the stakes of using the genre of apocalypse to narrate environmental crisis and the systems of violence coterminous with climate change.
which can be found here: https://www.academia.edu/45569872/_Master_Metaphor_Environmental_Apocalypse_and_the_Settler_States_of_Emergency
On October 27, Ammon Bundy and associates were acquitted of charges stemming from their armed takeover of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Bundy justified his occupation through the apocalyptic threat of white genocide to warrant his declaration of martial law and a state of emergency. On the same day, with the visual drama of an apocalyptic dystopian film, a militarized police force arrested 141 water protectors in Standing Rock, North Dakota–an area ostensibly secured by treaty rights, Native sovereignty, and the state of emergency that the tribe declared in August 2016. The divergent consequences of each “occupation” are marked by racial difference best understood in a genealogy of the genre of American apocalypse. This genre centers on the invocation of a state of emergency, which has ties to settler-colonial structures of the frontier, sovereignty, and racial fear that continue to influence juries and the use of police force in 2016. Apocalypse can be a framework for lived experience that a genealogy of the literary genre can help us understand. Moreover, this genealogy helps us understand the stakes of using the genre of apocalypse to narrate environmental crisis.
The apocalypse genre’s close ties with American environmentalism did not begin with the idea of slow violence, the term climate change, or even Rachel Carson. American apocalypse, and its environmental sub-genre, must be understood in the context of the genocide of Native peoples in the Americas. Just as Patrick Wolfe tells us that settler-colonialism is not an event, but a structure taking land as its primary object, Kyle Powys Whyte’s work reminds us that the structure of settler colonialism is a past and ongoing apocalypse. I place the contemporary events at Malheur and Standing Rock in conversation with their literary forbearers. Examples can be found in Frederick Jackson Turner’s “Frontier Thesis” and the simultaneous refutation of Turner’s thesis in Simon Pokagon’s “Red Man’s Rebuke” and in contemporary works like Ian McEwan’s Solar and Thomas King’s The Back of the Turtle. These texts exist within a genealogy of American apocalypse that reveals that while the American apocalypse genre typically regards the unsettling end of a (white) world, the genre has the potential for rupturing the exceptionalism inherent to its narrative emergency structure once situated in the context of settler colonialism.
Public-Facing Scholarship by April Anson
Ecofascism, like fascism, never springs from nowhere. It creeps through our language, metaphors, visual media, narratives, and ideas of environmental health and security. This zine is intended to be a tool to help halt ecofascism wherever, whenever it may be creeping, by examining its roots, prompting reflection, and inspiring action.
The Anti-Creep Climate Initiative smashes ecofascist mythology, champions liberatory environmental futures, and has fun doing it! The Initiative was formed by April Anson, Cassie Galentine, Shane Hall, Alex Menrisky, and Bruno Seraphin. April Anson is an Assistant Professor of Public Humanities at San Diego State University, core faculty for the Institute for Ethics and Public Policy, and affiliate faculty in American Indian Studies. Cassie Galentine is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Oregon. Shane Hall is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Salisbury University. Alex Menrisky is an Assistant Professor of English and affiliate faculty in American Studies at University of Connecticut. Bruno Seraphin is a doctoral candidate in sociocultural Anthropology with a graduate minor in American Indian and Indigenous Studies at Cornell University.