Environmental Humanities is pleased to announce that the winner of our 2023 Best Article Prize, given to an article published in the journal's pages in the preceding year, is “Cotton, Whiteness, and Other Poisons,” by Brian Williams and Jayson Maurice Porter, which appeared in the November 2022 issue.
In their article, Williams and Porter argue that the extensive use of pesticides and fertilizers on marginal cotton-producing lands of the southern United States was enabled and animated by anti-Blackness. Plantation logics devalued Black lives and labor, turning to chemical technological fixes to the cotton crises. Cotton fields were saturated with chemicals and with racism.
We recognize this article for its deep reading of historical sources that link the plantation to the mine, and agricultural chemicals to racial capitalism. As the authors demonstrate, “Cotton was made even more toxic by attempts to maintain its viability” (516). We applaud the authors for their examination of the historical ideas of environmental progress that have led to ongoing extensive environmental injustices.
In addition to naming our prize-winning article published in 2022, Environmental Humanities issues a commendation to Pierre du Plessis for his article “Tracking Meat of the Sand: Noticing Multispecies Landscapes in the Kalahari,” which appeared in the March 2022 issue.
Du Plessis examines the hunt for the Kalahari desert truffle as an tracking experience that attends to landscape assemblages. His ethnographic work with Indigenous interlocuters emphasizes multispecies landscapes as enacted stories of interaction. Through journeys to find the truffle, he reveals that “tracking truffles, even despite their nonpresence, represents a powerful theory of landscape” (67). Offering a new way of understanding tracking as noticing fluid assemblages in the landscape, this article is commended for stretching our understanding of tracking and gathering.
Environmental Humanities, published by Duke University Press, gives out a Best Article Prize annually to an article published in the pages of Environmental Humanities during the preceding calendar year. The award identifies and encourages innovative and well-written research in the broad field of environmental humanities, including both theoretical and applied contributions. The winner is chosen by the editorial team in collaboration with the journal’s scholarly oversight committee.
