“I am struck by the deeply physical and emotional engagement with landscape that these scholars, writers, and artists reveal.”

Welcome to this special Human/Nature issue of Southern Cultures. We are honored to have historian Andy Horowitz as our guest editor, on the heels of his brilliant new book Katrina: A History, 1915–2015, published in 2020. In it, Andy details the destructive forces that led to Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, notably, that Katrina was not just a natural disaster but also a human disaster shaped by decades of flawed policy, racism, and corporate-led environmental degradation, forces that also continue to shape the current COVID-19 pandemic.