Today, solar power merely fuels capitalism and imperialism. But drawing power from the sun is so radical it might transform that status quo.
Tag: Climate Change
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.
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.
Petro-Ghosts and Just Transitions
Latin America shows how hard it is for states dependent on oil and gas—that is, practically the whole world—to break with fossil fuel capitalism.
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.
Personal Comfort, Planetary Costs
When an increasingly uncomfortable climate forces more of life indoors, who might be forced to bear the costs?
Re-Word the World: On “Sonnet’s Shakespeare”
What happens when we dismantle the monumental status of a figure like Shakespeare in the canon? What other voices rise to describe the world?