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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Anthropocene and Empire
In the autumn of 1839, an unusually strong tropical storm devastated coastal communities along the Bay of Bengal in what was then the English East India Company’s premier settlement. A decade later, Company merchant and sometime scientist Henry Piddington coined the term “cyclone” to describe this climatological phenomenon, taking a cue from the seaborne storm’s…
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Backpacking Across “Stand Your Ground” Territory
The young man’s travel tale is a stalwart of American publishing. There’s the very famous story of two boys on the Mississippi, the Beat novel about road-tripping written on a giant spool of paper, and Tom Wolfe’s journalistic account of the Merry Pranksters (diehard trippers in both senses of the word). While American literary road…
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Too Bad About the Trees
This is the latest installment of our new blog series, An Engineer Reads a Novel. Heat and Light, Jennifer Haigh’s fifth novel, highlights the complexity, dirtiness, and danger of the labor of supplying the elemental heat and light of its deceptively simple title. Haigh sets her tale in a fictional coal mining town, Bakerton, Pennsylvania,…
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Waste, Value, and Environmental Racism in the Southwest
On August 5, 2015, a team contracted by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to investigate a leak at the Gold King mine in Silverton, Colorado, accidentally breached the mine, sending three million gallons of toxic wastewater in a foul yellow surge down the Animas River. The two nearest downstream communities are Silverton, a small…
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Planetary Politics
In 2000, the atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and the ecologist Eugene Stoermer proposed that the earth had entered a new age. The Holocene period, the geological term for the past 11,500 years, had given way to a new epoch—the Anthropocene. A warmer, more extreme, and less predictable pattern of weather had replaced the Holocene’s relatively…
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Dancing on a Crowded Planet
Thirty dancers are barely enough to fill the shadow of the life-sized blue whale that hangs, mid-dive, in the Milstein Hall of Ocean Life at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Yet on three nights in March, their seething performance succeeded in making the 29,000-square-foot room feel overpopulated. The performance was the…
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Forget Fertility, Get Feral
What’s more important to our planet’s future than little children? Global warming is about them, we’re told, and it’s on their behalf that we have to do better. Climate scientist James Hansen titled his memoir and climate science primer Storms of My Grandchildren. Naomi Klein’s fertility struggles frame the closing act of her epic This…
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Changing Climates of History
Neither Thucydides, Gibbon, von Ranke, nor Braudel ever cited a paper appearing in Geophysical Research Letters. They did not worry themselves about fluctuations in the Siberian High or the Southern Oscillation. The vast majority of more recent historians also remained untroubled by such concerns. However, in the past five years, a handful of highly distinguished…
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Rereading Walden
Pete Seeger once said, “If there’s one thing worse than banning a song, that’s making it official.” One could say something similar about good books: the one thing worse than banning the book is …
