A LETTER FROM THE EDITORS

On a hot Friday afternoon in September, many gathered in Foley Square and the streets around City Hall in lower Manhattan to hear Greta Tunberg, 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”—Tunberg 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. Tis was a collective recognition. Tis 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,” Gadfy 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 Tat Ting Over Tere that surrounds and sustains us.” In this issue, we bring environment into the foreground.

In “Who is Tomas Stockmann,” which traces the social and political history of environmentalism, Harison Stetler shows that the contemporary understanding of the “environment” has ebbed and fowed. 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 defnition, 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-

ments might have identifed problems of meaning, where the physical and abstract are kept separate, “environmental crisis” is a collapse: it is a problem of space, both physical and abstract.

However pervasive the problem, we hope not to catastrophize in broad strokes. While the environmental crisis has become, at times, an empty trope of political discourse, we do not wish to merely decry the disaster, nor to divine its solutions. In this issue, instead, the writers look to the roots and repercussions of the problems we have inherited. Drawing from Ibsen to Fanon, Aristotle to Hegel, economics to deep ecology, the articles, together, ofer a multifaceted, shifting picture of our relationship to the natural world.

Words might not be the answer; sometimes they are a part of the problem. Te idea of the “natural,” as Daniel Driscoll explains, has been used to justify capitalist ideologies. Te seemingly innocent concept of “emotion,” Emma James argues, reinforces an underlying anthropocentrism. And the expression “mother Earth,” Nick Ribolla suggests, points to a disturbing parallel between the exploitation of nature and the exploitation of women. Indeed, writing about nature—speaking about nature—is itself, as Maddie Woda explores, inherently confned to the realm of man, and therefore limited to artifce.

A LETTER But words, or a closer look at them, can be a start. Tis issue is an attempt at a start—a start to dispelling misunderstanding, to confronting exploitation. We flter through various environments as we go about our daily rituals, and as we move through life: we experience internal and external space, “intellectual environments,” and the often tempestuous environment of emotions. By addressing how these environments transform, contaminate and are contaminated, this issue attempts to look directly into the environmental unconscious. We are grateful for the opportunity to publish our frst fall publication. Specifcally, we thank Columbia University’s Department of Philosophy for helping us produce Gadfy. We also thank the Arts Initiative for their generous support. Finally, most of all, we thank our wonderful contributors and board. To end this preamble is not to end the ongoing global discussion. As we enter a new decade, we ofer a call to action. At the climate march in September one sign particularly resonated. In bold black letters, accompanied by a swallow in fight were the words, “Grieve Ten Act.” As you read the following, acknowledge both the weight of grief and the imperative: act.

WRETCHED IS THE EARTH