Finis Dunaway
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finisdunaway.bsky.social
Finis Dunaway
@finisdunaway.bsky.social

Historian | Author of DEFENDING THE ARCTIC REFUGE, SEEING GREEN, & NATURAL VISIONS | Environmental History & Visual Culture | North American West, Arctic, & other places

Arctic Refuge Public History site: defendingthearcticrefuge.com .. more

Philosophy 19%
Environmental science 19%

Congratulations to Jackson Pind on the publication of STUDENTS BY DAY—a history of colonial education and Indigenous resistance at the Curve Lake First Nation. @mcgillqueensup.bsky.social
www.mqup.ca/students-by-...

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So proud to have co-edited the forthcoming volume, “Globalizing Wildlife,” with @rafdebont.bsky.social and Tom Quick 🌎🌍🌏🐀🦜🦏🐅🦦 from @uncpress.bsky.social in their series Flows, Migrations, and Exchanges

www.uncpress.org/book/9781469...
Globalizing Wildlife
Humans have always incorporated wildlife into processes of work, capture, and exchange. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, globalization became t...
www.uncpress.org
“And then you have librarians who are experiencing a real existential crisis because they are getting asked by their jobs to promote [AI] tools that produce more misinformation. It's the most, like, emperor-has-no-clothes-type situation that I have ever witnessed.” - Alison Macrina
AI Is Supercharging the War on Libraries, Education, and Human Knowledge
"Fascism and AI, whether or not they have the same goals, they sure are working to accelerate one another."
www.404media.co
1.This is not the only known example we know of ChatGPT cheering on a vulnerable young person to die by suicide, this time it is a recent Texas A&M grad
2. Every single university that has invited OpenAI into our midst should be asked to account for their choices.
www.cnn.com/2025/11/06/u...

With the Arctic Refuge back in the news (yes, Trump is trying once again to turn it into an oil field), maybe it’s a good time to check out Defending the Arctic Refuge. @uncpress.bsky.social #envhist 📗❄️🦌
Defending the Arctic Refuge
Tucked away in the northeastern corner of Alaska is one of the most contested landscapes in all of North America: the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Consid...
uncpress.org

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The push to pump "AI" into everything is coming from the industry that profits from it, academia's middle managers who are happy to buy it, and parents who simply don't know any better because it's frankly not their job to.

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“I already ban the use of generative AI in my own courses, and as a promoter of master’s theses. I explicitly tell my students they won’t learn anything by using it. [...] A general ban is necessary, but nobody dares to say so.”

🙋🏻‍♀️🙋🏻‍♀️🙋🏻‍♀️

apache.be/2025/10/24/b...
Belgian AI scientists resist the use of AI in academia
Several AI scientists have published an open letter calling for a ban on AI use by students.
apache.be
I am close to tears; they listened and made an english version apache.be/2025/10/24/b...

@apache.be you rule 🖤

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The AI industry wants us to believe AI superintelligence is the real threat from generative AI.

But that narrative was crafted to distract from the many ways genAI is being used to tear our societies apart, as we saw this week when a deepfake video rocked the Irish election. It must be reined in.
Generative AI is a societal disaster
Governments are deluding themselves into believing investment justifies allowing AI to upend society
disconnect.blog
built on theft and at massive environmental cost and most importantly, numerous studies keep demonstrating that genAI tools often work a little better than by chance. how is it that we can’t expunge these slop machines out of our institutions and communities

www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/...
Largest study of its kind shows AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time – regardless of language or territory
An intensive international study was coordinated by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and led by the BBC
www.bbc.co.uk
Congratulations to Holly Miowak Guise whose book ALASKA NATIVE RESILIENCE won three book awards from the Western History Association! #WHA2025
@hollyguise.bsky.social
“Alaska Native Resilience” Garners Western History Association Awards
Congratulations to Holly Miowak Guise whose book “Alaska Native Resilience: Voices from World War II” was awarded three prizes from the Western History Association.
uwpressblog.com

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"For the people of Curve Lake and other Williams Treaties First Nations, the combined impact of the treaty and the day school system was suffocating. One removed them from the Land legally. The other worked to remove them from the Land ideologically." - Jackson Pind
The Williams Treaties and Indian Day Schools: Law and Schooling as Tools of Dispossession
Williams Treaties and Indian Day Schools dispossessed Anishinaabe from Land and identity, yet cultural resilience, language, and Land-based resurgencies endure.
niche-canada.org
OpenAI *really* isn't hiding its intention to power the AI boom with fossil fuels.

New from me @desmog.com

www.desmog.com/2025/10/13/o...
OpenAI’s New Energy Chief Is a Trump Administration Natural Gas Evangelist
The ChatGPT creator hired John McCarrick, a gas-loving former Trump energy official, to guide how the company will source huge quantities of power for its colossal supercomputers.
www.desmog.com
Bloomberg analysis reveals that electricity in areas near data centers has risen, a lot: www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202...

Energy is up to 267% costlier in areas w/ a data center nearby:

That's such wonderful news--congratulations, Holly! ❄️🎉🥳
A striking thing about articles I’ve read claiming to “study the effects” of generative AI on student writing skills and consumption of information is that (1) they nearly always find the effects are negative and (2) most “conclusions” are still written assuming that we must use AI, for some reason.

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"Why would OpenAI and Microsoft spend $23 million to give 'free training' on how to use AI to teachers? Because they love teachers? No. Because they want to get their products into public schools in an attempt to cultivate the education market."
I maintain that we are in grave danger due not only to the trends noted by @hamiltonnolan.bsky.social in this piece, but by the failure of the Democratic party 1) to grasp these dangers and act in advance to prevent or minimize them; (1)

www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/thinking-o...
Thinking of AI as a Social Problem
No need to know the unknowable. The knowable is bad enough.
www.hamiltonnolan.com

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Hard no to the educational evangelists now pushing us to ‘embrace’ corporate gen AI as inevitable. And shame on the universities buying this crap and funding ‘expert’ speaker series espousing it.

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Sincere question: is there a single college or university anywhere that is approaching AI from a position of resistance?
We are thrilled to announce that our NEW Large Language Model will be released on 11.18.25.

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Crystal Fraser and I are co-editing a series on environmental histories of Indian residential and day schools for @nichecanada.bsky.social. We chose to launch the series on Orange Shirt Day, in part, to remind historians of their responsibilities to Survivors and intergenerational Survivors.
Environmental History and the Work of Truth and Reconciliation
This series links residential and day school histories with environment, amplifying Survivors’ voices, countering denialism, and fostering reconciliation.
niche-canada.org

Thanks for sharing—so glad to hear you’ve enjoyed teaching with this article. Congrats on the new EH article and the podcast!

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Amazing! This isn't a new one but I love teaching Finis Dunaway's article on the visual politics of modern environmentalism www.jstor.org/stable/40068...; it would work as a contextual article for what happened before the story I tell, that is envtal consciousness in the 70s.
Gas Masks, Pogo, and the Ecological Indian: Earth Day and the Visual Politics of American Environmentalism on JSTOR
Finis Dunaway, Gas Masks, Pogo, and the Ecological Indian: Earth Day and the Visual Politics of American Environmentalism, American Quarterly, Vol. 60, No. 1 (Mar., 2008), pp. 67-99
www.jstor.org

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Today is a good work day 😀

🤓 Worked with @anjakrieger.bsky.social, creator of The Plastisphere podcast on 2 episodes on the history of beach cleanups and ocean plastic pollution 🐠🥤
🎙️ Listen below to a SNEAK PEAK!
📅 Ep. 1 is released next week
📖 Read my Enviro Hist article for background research
I've been working for many months on this article on Silicon Valley's under-the-radar role in bringing AI into schools across the US. I really hope you'll read it — here's a gift link — but I'll tell you some of the highlights in this thread. (1/x)
How Chatbots and AI Are Already Transforming Kids' Classrooms
Educators across the country are bringing chatbots into their lesson plans. Will it help kids learn or is it just another doomed ed-tech fad?
www.bloomberg.com

What wonderful news—congratulations, Julianne!

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Grateful to so many in announcing today’s launch of *”Alaska” is Not a Blank Space: Unsettling Aldo Leopold’s Odyssey* (@universitypress.cambridge). Free downloads now til 9/11/25+for print order here: doi.org/10.1017/9781.... (I recommend checking out the whole series, starting with Gahman, et al!)
AI advocates have warned that if every author in the class action filed a claim, it would "financially ruin" the entire industry.
Authors celebrate “historic” settlement coming soon in Anthropic class action
Advocates fear such settlements will “financially ruin” the AI industry.
arstechnica.com