Tag: Environmental Studies

Let Us Now See Climate Change

How can we learn to see climate change around us? What would it really look like for climate change to come into our homes and lives? It used to be that climate ...

The Holocene Hangover

As a child growing up in the early 1980s, I often daydreamed of space exploration and interstellar frontiers. The leap into outer space seemed tantalizingly close. In the science fiction stories I ...

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 ...

Too Bad About the Trees

This is the latest installment of our new blog series, An Engineer Reads a Novel.   Heat and Light, Jennifer Haigh’s fifth novel, highlights the complexity, dirtiness, and danger of the labor of ...

Alone on the Montague Plains

This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. Drive a few miles above the legal speed limit on Lake Pleasant Road, and you’re likely ...

City of the Future

This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. “Been gardening?” the Greens campaigner asks. I’ve stopped to chat, knees and hands ...

On Cicadas

This is the latest installment of El Mirador, an ongoing series curated by Francisco Cantú. Spanish for “the lookout point,” El Mirador collects original nonfiction, translation, and visual art on ...

Planetary Politics

In 2000, the atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and the ecologist Eugene Stoermer proposed that the earth had entered a new age. The Holocene period, the geological term for the past 11,500 years, had ...

Gates

This is the latest installment of El Mirador an ongoing series curated by Francisco Cantú. Spanish for “the lookout point,” El Mirador collects original nonfiction, translation, and visual art on the ...

Forget Fertility, Get Feral

What’s more important to our planet’s future than little children? Global warming is about them, we’re told, and it’s on their behalf that we have to do better. Climate scientist James Hansen titled ...

Global Warming and Network Think

On August 26th, 2014, in the lead-up to the United Nations summit scheduled for the following month, the New York Times carried a story on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest draft ...

Toxic Literature

When all that is solid melts into air, the plot thickens. Darragh McKeon’s debut novel, All That Is Solid Melts into Air, and Heather Houser’s first monograph of literary criticism, Ecosickness in ...

Rereading Walden

Pete Seeger once said, “If there’s one thing worse than banning a song, that’s making it official.” One could say something similar about good books: the one thing worse than banning the book is ...

Historical Futorology

These days headlines often read like plot points in an apocalyptic science-fiction story: Fossil fuel use has reengineered the earth’s atmosphere and acidified the oceans. Polar ice sheets are ...

Beautiful Disaster

Hurricane Sandy, like many disasters today, was a media event. Striking images flashed across screens. The skyline divided into light and dark. Small groups of people huddled around power strips ...