Research
My research concerns the production of wilderness space as a solution to a crisis of late capitalism, and the subsequent displacement of poor and working class people from exindustrial areas in the United States as they are targeted for restoration, preservation and Arcadian development. As a political ecologist, I'm particularly interested in the implications of forest enclosure and protection for rural housing, labor precarity, social reproduction, environmental justice, the criminalization of forest subsistence and class conflict over public space. I also write occasionally about rural politics from the perspective of critical white studies. My research is both ethnographic and historical and focuses on the landscape and people of the six million-acre Adirondack Park in upstate New York, where the local working class is being gentrified out of existence. My theoretical approach is Marxist most days of the week, aligning most closely with the ideas of radical urban geographers.
Publications
Recent Writing
The Devil’s Due: Adirondack Gentrification and Environmental Justice, Parts 1-7 (New York Almanack, 2021)
The Rest of the Story, Part 1 (Adirondack Daily Enterprise, 2021)
The Rest of the Story, Part 2 (Adirondack Daily Enterprise, 2021)
Bewildered: The Subversion of Sarah Bennett (Adirondack Life Online Version, 2019)
Old Wives’ Tale: Exorcizing the "Witch of the Adirondacks" (Adirondack Life Print Version, 2019)
A People’s History of Hamilton County
(2016-2020; Click here to read)
Telling the Wild: People and Power in Southern Adirondack History
Long Gone: The Rise and Fall of Spectacular Industry in the Central Adirondacks
Woodswork: Labor and Livelihood on the Edge of the Adirondacks
Fire on the Mountain: Uneven Development in the Adirondacks
Woodspeople: The Making of Adirondack Identity
Academic
Darling, Eliza Jane
2009
O Sister! Sarah Palin and the Parlous Politics of Poor White Trash
Dialectical Anthropology 33(1):15-27
Darling, Eliza Jane
2009
Of Reds and Rednecks: Response to Ed Hansen and Herman Rebel
Dialectical Anthropology 33(1):44-47
Darling, Eliza
2006
Nature’s Carnival: The Ecology of Pleasure at Coney Island
In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism
Nik Heynen, Maria Kaika, & Erik Swyngedouw, eds.
London: Routledge
Darling, Eliza
2005
The City in the Country: Wilderness Gentrification and the Rent Gap
Environment and Planning A 37:1015-1032
Darling, Eliza
2001
The Lorax Redux: Profit Biggering and Some Selective Silences in American Environmentalism
Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 12(4): 51-66