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.
Tag: Climate Change
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?
Plants and Other Science Fictions
Can thinking like a plant save the world?
Why Write? Toward a Style for Climate Change
What should climate-change writing be? What is its ambition as it moves forward?
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.
Pandemic Déjà Vu
The COVID-19 global pandemic has been described as an unprecedented global event. Yet for some, the virus arrives with uncanny familiarity.
The Oligarchs’ Charter
Today we know that, just as Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson predicted, economic elites will never relinquish supreme power easily.
This Is Not an Essay on Poetry of the Past 20 Years
I am tired of catalogues and catalogue poems, and of surveys and surveillance—though I appreciate a bird’s-eye view of the terrain as well as anyone.
All Tomorrow’s Warnings
Both left and right employ “speculative nonfiction” to imagine the world after climate change. But who will win the battle of the futurists?
Why Seek Impossible Foods?
The Impossible™ burger does pollute less. But does this matter, in the face of capitalism’s continued control of the global food system?
Public Thinker: Yarimar Bonilla on Decolonizing Decolonization
“Hurricane Maria ushered in a great deal of trauma and suffering, but it also allowed us to reassess the very nature of the political.”
Caught Mapping
The fires that are burning across Australia are changing this place, quite possibly forever, and with it our natural, social, cultural, and political narratives.
Alison Carey and Amrita Ramanan on Theater and Climate Change
"Greenturgy" orients a theatrical production toward the play's environment. And every play has one.
When’s the Beef?
In Terry Bisson’s 1991 sci-fi story, “They’re Made Out of Meat,” two characters discuss alien life-forms that have been attempting to make contact with their species. The conversation returns again ...
“There Is Always a Norther North”: Highway 1, Alaska
There’s a fire burning by Swan Lake. For the sixth time in the last 20 years ...
A Manifesto for the World as One Finds It
Animals have been disappearing for the past two centuries: first from our everyday lives, in the era of urbanization and industrialization, and then, as the sixth ...
The World the Gulf Has Built
The viewing platform of the Burj Khalifa, currently the tallest building in the world, provides an exceptional view. On a clear day, you can see Dubai’s towers ...
Elizabeth Rush on Listening to Those on the Frontline of Climate Change
I often find myself pulling books from my office shelves to loan to whatever MFA student or undergraduate has dropped in for a visit. It’s a delight to first listen to a curious writer discuss their ...
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 ...