Unnatural Disasters: Floods, Forests, and Fossil Fuels in the Anthropocene

A series with Damascus Citizens for Sustainability and the DVAA

JENNIFER KABAT, MELANIE HOLLOWAY, JUSTIN NOBEL

including a special pond performance by David Rothenberg

This 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 Eight Moon – uncovers how landscapes bear the scars of human intervention, tracing floods and geoengineering in the Catskills to reveal nature’s defiance against control. Melanie 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.