“We bring our own creativity into what we see—the seams get filled in, smoothed over, by our looking.”
Tag: Anthropocene
Stories of Soil, Soy, and Life Otherwise
What happens when thinking of soil as a living being and force, with whom the human world needs to repair and rebuild ties?
Opening the Anthropocene Archives
The Anthropocene has long been discussed in terms of hard science. What do the humanities have to teach about this human age?
Swimming in the Anthropocene
Human bodies in deep water feel nature’s power and our own relative weakness. As seas rise, we should heed the swimmers.
Can Comics Save Your Life?
In lockdown, one shop asked for people to submit comics of “a utopian world after we survive this moment.” Hundreds around the world answered.
Injustice in the Breeze
Energy companies promise to “go green.” Yet they use the same forms of extractive capitalism that have destroyed the planet’s climate.
Toward a Cellular Humanities
Are our phones the bane of critical thought? Or might they be our latest texts to read and interpret—objects worthy of inquiry and analysis?
Signs and Wonders
I’m walking to Mrs. Macquarie’s Chair in Sydney’s Domain at high tide, scanning the small bay in Woolloomooloo, as I always do, for fish or stingrays. There’s nothing to see in the flat green water nudging the sandstone cliffs ...
“Hopelessness Makes Possible a New Hope”
Though it’s more than a hundred miles from the coast, during the early evening of October 29, 2012, my apartment in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, had the salty ...
Ending the Anthropocene
One might think that the patent anthropocentrism of the concept of “Anthropocene” would suffice to invite a clear opposition, and, yet ...
Corporate Responsibility in the Climate Crisis
In France, a recent legislative bill identified the task of bringing about “corporate transformation” as one of the major challenges of the 21st century ...
Who Will Save the Planet?
Might the market provide us with solutions to fighting climate change, or is it part of the very problem that lies before us?
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 ...
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 ...
What It Feels Like When Your World Ends
The increasingly popular genre recently christened “cli-fi,” or climate change fiction, tends to move from the outside in: as the environment deteriorates ...
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 ...
Design Against Disaster
What is to be done? We are the hapless victims of rising temperatures and tides, droughts and superstorms. Infrastructure buckles and the water is full of lead. Of course all urban ecological ...
Earth First, Then Mars: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson
No writer has done more to realistically imagine the development of human life on other planets ...
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 ...