O
n a hot Friday afternoon in September, many gathered in Foley Square and the streets around City Hall in lower Manhattan to hear Greta Thunberg, the 15-year-old climate activist from Sweden, speak. Above a sea of colorful handmade signs—“I cry for the trees,” “nature always wins,” “we are running out of time”—Thunberg reminded us that, for a while now, we have been running out of time. Perhaps, as many environmental scientists have indicated, we already have. Her words incited the furiosity in the air. “What do we want? Climate Justice! When do we want it? Now!” erupted through the crowd. This was a collective recognition. This was, echoing Aristotelian tragedy, our anagnorisis; this was our tragic realization that, through human folly, the earth is shuddering. “Nowadays,” Timothy Morton writes in Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, “hardly anybody likes it when you mention the environment.” At the risk of sounding “boring or judgmental or hysterical, or a mixture of all of these,” Gadfly wants to pause and think about the environment. Likening the environment to the unconscious, Morton suggests that just as “nobody likes it when you mention the unconscious,” because when you do “it becomes conscious,” nobody likes discourse about the environment because it provokes an uncovering. When you mention the environment, it ceases to be the environment, the background, the liminal space between. “It stops being That Thing Over There that surrounds and sustains us.” In this issue, we bring environment into the foreground. In “Who is Thomas Stockmann,” which traces the social and political history of environmentalism, Harison Stetler shows that the contemporary understanding of the “environment” has ebbed and flowed. What has historically been “there”—milieu and background, or habitat and weather—is now, increasingly and urgently, “here”—the Earth. While Morton investigates ecological systems (just as this issue explores elements of trees and Shakespearean greens), he also discusses texts, writers, composers, and artists. Indeed, Morton writes, environmental philosophy “delves into all types of ideas about space and place (global, local, cosmopolitan, regionalist).” Following this broader, historically rooted definition, we also consider “environment” not just as ecological space, but as social, literary, artistic and economic space. In an interview with Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University, we look to the campus as embedded in its own various other environments. Likewise, Benjamin Dubow links our relationship with the natural world to the relationships between colonial and imperial bodies, suggesting cyclical patterns across time and geography. Where past intellectual move-
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