Section
Climate Change
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Walking Lahore, Watching the World
The new mosque’s central dome dominates the town’s skyline, but competes with an 80-metre-high replica Eiffel Tower, and a scale reproduction of Trafalgar Square.
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Why Seek Impossible Foods?
The Impossible™ burger does pollute less. But does this matter, in the face of capitalism’s continued control of the global food system?
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Public Thinker: Jenny Price on Refusing to Save the Planet
“First: Why are we not making more progress? Second: Why do so many people hate environmentalists?” [none-for-homepage]
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Alison Carey and Amrita Ramanan on Theater and Climate Change
“Greenturgy” orients a theatrical production toward the play’s environment. And every play has one.
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A Manifesto for the World as One Finds It
Animals have been disappearing for the past two centuries: first from our everyday lives, in the era of urbanization and industrialization, and then, as the sixth …
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When Did Nature Become Moral?
When did nature become a good for cities? When did city dwellers start imagining nature to be something they were missing? Today, urbanites’ moral associations …
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Elizabeth Rush on Listening to Those on the Frontline of Climate Change
I often find myself pulling books from my office shelves to loan to whatever MFA student or undergraduate has dropped in for a visit. It’s a delight to first listen to a curious writer discuss their … [none-for-homepage]
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Loving Wilderness, Loving Borders
The Wednesday after the 2016 election, my son, Julien, arrived home from school crying. “Do we have to go home, too?” He had been talking with some of his …
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Should Environmentalists Learn to Take a Joke?
Nicole Seymour is fed up with sanctimoniousness, with judgment, and especially with normative expectations of what environmentalism should look and feel like …
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Public Thinker: Stuart Kirsch on Engaged Anthropology
Stuart Kirsch began his career as an anthropologist doing research on myth …
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Financial Markets Were Not Designed to Manage the Planet
In a market economy, almost by definition, it is the price of things that …
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The State Will Not Save Us
In policy circles today, the primacy of the capitalist state in efforts to confront climate change is a given. This is a premise worth questioning.
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“A Gun to Our Heads”
On October 13, 2016, Almir Suruí, then chief of the Paiter Suruí indigenous people of northwest Brazil, issued a panicked appeal. “This is my cry of alarm, please listen to me!” he wrote to national and international authorities and environmentalists. “We are undergoing a total invasion of deforesters and miners of diamonds and gold.” Each day 300 trucks enter…
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The Big Picture: Building a Climate Coalition
Donald J. Trump has given notice of US withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement of December 2015 and made clear that his administration is committed to dismantling the government-based scientific and policy infrastructure created during the Obama administration to cope with the dangers of climate change. If, as seems likely, these policy shifts help to…
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The Big Picture: Resource Extraction
Trump has a range of cons going, but one of the most outrageous is this: he is about to fleece his working-class supporters in the Rust Belt, coal country, and the rural Pacific Northwest …
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Your Prius Is Not Enough
Many of those who voted for Donald Trump were elated by his withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement. For Trump supporters, environmentalism is a dirty word, and like other policies designed to protect the natural world, the Paris accord was bad for American jobs, foisted on the country by out-of-touch tree huggers. Environmentalists, the stereotype…
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Thoreau, Prophet of the Anthropocene
I was halfway through Laura Dassow Walls’s new biography of Henry David Thoreau when my partner and I celebrated his birthday on our favorite stretch of …
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Rising Tides, Rising Profits
In New York 2140, Kim Stanley Robinson takes on one of the almost unimaginable yet probable outcomes of climate change: that in the foreseeable future, some …
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On the Origin of Extinction
Extinction has never been a purely scientific concept. When theories of extinction exploded onto the Western intellectual scene in the early 19th …
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The Holocene Hangover
As a child growing up in the early 1980s, I often daydreamed of space exploration and interstellar frontiers. The leap into outer space seemed tantalizingly close. In the science fiction stories I read, the chronology of the future was also the potential biography of adulthood. One story projected a settlement on Mars in 1995; another…
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How to Live in Uncertain Times
Doomsday is a messy affair. We fix our anxious gaze on the horizon, awaiting the moment when the air will prove too warm, the sea too toxic, the ground unfirm. We live in a time we are calling the Anthropocene, an epoch in which our presence on Earth is inscribed in the geological record. We…
