Against Nature: Floods, Forests & the Fossil Fuel Age

This special panel brings together three urgent works that explore humanity’s fraught relationship with the natural world—from the violence of extraction to resilience and survival. Jennifer Kabat’s Nightshining - a follow-up to 2024's The Eighth Moon - uncovers how landscapes bear the scars of human intervention, tracing floods and geoengineering in the Catskills to reveal nature’s defiance against control. Marguerite Holloway’s Take to the Trees shifts the focus to intimate resistance, as tree-climbing becomes both a literal and metaphorical act of grappling with ecological loss and personal transformation. Justin Nobel’s Petroleum-238 exposes the systemic rot beneath it all: an oil industry’s radioactive deception, poisoning land and laborers alike.

Together, these books raise critical questions: How do we reckon with legacies of environmental harm—both deliberate and unintended? Where do personal and planetary grief intersect? And what forms of resilience, whether collective action or solitary communion with nature, might point a way forward? From floods to forests to fossil fuels, this panel confronts the false divide between "natural" disaster and human-made crisis, offering a stark yet hopeful exploration of our entangled fates.

After the panel, please join environmental musician and writer David Rothenberg for a one-of-a-kind immersive pond performance at Little Lake Erie in Narrowsburg. Please note: this portion is ticketed at $20 a person.

Rothenberg — who sinks microphones into ponds to amplify the hidden symphonies of aquatic life — will bring us into an alien soundscape: the crackling, clicking, and chorusing of creatures and processes we rarely are allowed to listen to, let alone take the time to. His work blends live recordings with insights from collaborators like Werner Herzog and Peter Gabriel and challenges human-centric perspectives, revealing ponds as vibrant acoustic communities.

Marguerite Holloway has written for the New York Times and the New Yorker, among other publications, and is the author of The Measure of Manhattan. She is a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. She lives in New York City.

Jennifer Kabat’s diptych The Eighth Moon and Nightshining are published by Milkweed Editions. She’s been awarded a Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her criticism, and the books were supported by grants from the Silvers Foundation and NYFA. Her essays and criticism have appeared in 4 Columns, Frieze, Granta, The White Review, BOMB, Harper’s, The Believer, and McSweeney’s as well as Best American Essays. She lives in rural New York, serves in her local fire department and teaches in the Design Research MA program at SVA.

Justin Nobel is an award-winning journalist who covers science and environmental justice. His book Petroleum-238: Big Oil’s Dangerous Secret and the Grassroots Fight to Stop It was published in 2024. His work has been published in Rolling Stone, Orion, Tin House, and Virginia Quarterly Review, as well as Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014 and Best American Travel Writing 2011 and 2016. In 2016, The Story of Dan Bright, a book he co-wrote with a New Orleans death row exoneree, was published by University of New Orleans Press.

David Rothenberg is a musician, composer, writer, and philosopher-naturalist who wrote Why Birds Sing, Bug Music, Survival of the Beautiful and many other books, published in at least eleven languages. He has more than forty published recordings, including One Dark Night I Left My Silent House which came out on ECM, and most recently In the Wake of Memories and Faultlines. He has performed and recorded with Pauline Oliveros, Peter Gabriel, Ray Phiri, Suzanne Vega, Scanner, Elliott Sharp, Umru, Iva Bittová, and the Karnataka College of Percussion. In 2024 he was awarded a Grammy as part of , in the category of Best Boxed Set. and are his latest books, while and are his latest films. Rothenberg is Distinguished Professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

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