Section
Climate Change
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“If a Woman Commanded Fire”: Talking Historical Stoves and Affordable Energy with Joyce Chaplin
“The idea that better indoor heating could be invented that would make an entire room warm was really astonishing.”
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Planetary Alchemy, or, Learning to Read the Earth with “Zelda”
“Tears of the Kingdom” lets you play through the planetary archive. In so doing, it suggests the pleasures of thinking at planetary scale.
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Public Thinker: Infrastructure Tells Us That We Need One Another
“Seeing infrastructural systems for what they are requires us to understand them as the product of massive collective investment and to reflect on the value of that.”
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Eating Out in the Apocalypse
Can pleasure take place against the backdrop of climate crisis?
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Is the World Enough?
Is our relation to the earth mainly a story of scarcity, of insatiable wants curbed by a finite planet?
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South Africa: Living in a Future Way Ahead of Our Time
“The human capacity for oxymoronic optimism will literally take your breath away if you’re among the millions living downwind from the dumps.”
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Oil and Injury in Los Angeles
The city’s ports may be physically located in the imperial core—inside the barricades of the USA—but their tendrils span the globe.
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Five Books on Labor and Ecology
Our scorching planetary age results from the conjoined forces of colonial extractivism, fossil capitalism, and postcolonial developmentalism.
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All Futures Are Possible
“It is fanciful to invest too much faith in the isolated act of reading – the stimulated, inspired or entertained brain does not store carbon.”
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Can Solarpunk Save the World?
Today, solar power merely fuels capitalism and imperialism. But drawing power from the sun is so radical it might transform that status quo.
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How to Profit from Climate Change
How did capitalism waste the crucial decades when climate change could have been halted? By fixating on—and downplaying—“risk.”
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Invitations to the Voyage
Three new poetry collections depart on a cosmic journey to reckon with ecology and our relations to a suffering earth.
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Would that the Earth Could Stop Us
“Ecohorror” films depict nature avenging itself on humans, revealing a common but wrong-headed hope: that nature can win, even if we do nothing.
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Apocalypse and Anticlimax: The Petrified Forest, Calistoga, CA
Unlike us today, the Victorians who discovered this stone forest were less afraid of the future than they were of forgetting the past.
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Hiding in Plain Sight: Talking Aquifer Depletion with Lucas Bessire
“The everyday ways that people challenge environmental destruction can be quite powerful.”
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This Land Is My Land
Many landowners view themselves as environmental stewards. But can the environment ever be protected within the frame of private property?
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A Messy Utopia Is All We Might Get
Climate change didn’t just wreck the planet; it closed off and reshaped the future. Even utopia—if we reach it—will be a mess.
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Energy “Realism” Is Climate Fatalism
Americans may not want to hear this, but it might be best if the US is not the country leading the world through the climate crisis.
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Why Write? Toward a Style for Climate Change
What should climate-change writing be? What is its ambition as it moves forward?
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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.
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Unruly Objects
By making familiar objects strange, two new books of poetry reveal the limits of overly simple critique.
