“The human capacity for oxymoronic optimism will literally take your breath away if you’re among the millions living downwind from the dumps.”
Tag: Climate Change
How to Embrace a Wildfire: A Path Out of the Smoke
Is there a path for living that acknowledges, and allows us to start from, our careful attachments in order to connect with others in politically productive ways?
Five Books on Labor and Ecology
Our scorching planetary age results from the conjoined forces of colonial extractivism, fossil capitalism, and postcolonial developmentalism.
Protean Environment and Political Possibilities
As the planet warms, environmental destruction obliges us to revise the technoscience expertise and institutions once based on colonial legacies.
The Seduction of Desert Spectacles: Talking “Arid Empire” with Natalie Koch and Andrew Curley
“You cannot divorce domestic empire from international empire. Those histories created one another.”
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.
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.”
Invitations to the Voyage
Three new poetry collections depart on a cosmic journey to reckon with ecology and our relations to a suffering earth.
Mapping Race & Rightlessness Across Deep Time
“What would it mean to create a sanctuary for all?”
Succeeding through Failure: Andrew Lakoff on Preparing for Emergencies
“What is the range of available measures to address our catastrophic future?”
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.
Rebecca Solnit on George Orwell
“We need food, clothing, shelter, and healthcare, but we deserve that unquantifiable, experiential thing that is education, culture, leisure, beauty, nature.”
B-Sides: Jesmyn Ward’s “Where the Line Bleeds”
Novelist Jesmyn Ward is known for historical grandiosity, but her long-overlooked book “Sing, Unburied, Sing” turns away from realism into the realm of generic strangeness.
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.
Poetry for the Deluge
Amid this turbulent present, can poetry call attention to creative forms of survival and persistence, human and nonhuman?
How to Live Among What Is Dead
“Octavia Butler teaches us,” explains Black playwright Ericka Dickerson-Despenza, “…that we have two options in Apocalypse: adapt or die.”
What to Do About Freedom?
Once, radical artists and thinkers shook up conservatives. Now, it’s the right gleefully transgressing a “moralizing” left. What happened?
How to See Silicon Valley: Talking with Mary Beth Meehan and Fred Turner
"The ways in which the community itself is breaking down felt like end game capitalism."
The Planet Needs Collective Action—Not Tech
Digital tech cannot stop climate change merely by “greening” individual consumption.
How to Dream beyond Oil
Energy sources shape, rather than simply serve, our social and cultural imaginaries. Recognizing this poses a different set of challenges for how we might contend with our current planetary emergency.