​​Local Ecologies is an innovative multimedia exploration of the diverse coastal and river ecosystems of Eastern Massachusetts. The book’s rich archive of essays, interviews, and artistic projects reveals the region’s layered Indigenous, colonial, and industrial histories, showing how art can deepen understanding of place through strategies for reading the ground with greater care. By recognizing entangled histories and working within difficult inheritances, this volume foregrounds multiple ways of knowing and making place—through observation, research, memory, and collective action—offering the reader models for ongoing engagement with the region and beyond.

Developed through a multiyear collaboration among artists, scholars, activists, and community stakeholders, this volume takes its name from an initiative hosted by three University of Massachusetts campuses (Boston, Dartmouth, and Lowell) in 2019 and 2020. In expanded forms, the book’s contributors reflect on sites such as Jerry’s Pond in Cambridge, Deer Island in Boston Harbor, New Bedford Harbor, and the Merrimack River, tracing histories of colonialism and displacement, and presenting contemporary acts of resistance and reclamation. At a moment when the infrastructures of cultural memory are increasingly under threat, Local Ecologies insists on art as a vital mode of collective reckoning and possibility.