Stuart Kirsch began his career as an anthropologist doing research on myth ...
Tag: Environmentalism
Financial Markets Were Not Designed to Manage the Planet
In a market economy, almost by definition, it is the price of things that ...
The State Will Not Save Us
In policy circles today, the primacy of the capitalist state in efforts to confront climate change is a given. This is a premise worth questioning.
“A Gun to Our Heads”
On October 13, 2016, Almir Suruí, then chief of the Paiter Suruí indigenous people of northwest Brazil, issued a panicked appeal. “This is my cry of alarm, please listen to me!” he wrote to national ...
Against Cuteness: “Bambi” @90
Felix Salten’s Bambi: A Life in the Woods—which first appeared in English 90 years ago this summer—is now better known as the inspiration for Disney’s charming ...
India’s Garbage Politics
Writing in 1993, after decades spent documenting America’s shifting landscapes, poet A. R. Ammons suggested that “garbage [ought] to be the poem of our time.” Inspired by “mounds of disposal” along a ...
The Big Picture: Building a Climate Coalition
Donald J. Trump has given notice of US withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement of December 2015 and made clear that his administration is committed to dismantling the government-based scientific ...
The Big Picture: Resource Extraction
Trump has a range of cons going, but one of the most outrageous is this: he is about to fleece his working-class supporters in the Rust Belt, coal country, and the rural Pacific Northwest ...
Your Prius Is Not Enough
Many of those who voted for Donald Trump were elated by his withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement. For Trump supporters, environmentalism is a dirty word, and like other policies designed to ...
Thoreau, Prophet of the Anthropocene
I was halfway through Laura Dassow Walls’s new biography of Henry David Thoreau when my partner and I celebrated his birthday on our favorite stretch of ...
Rising Tides, Rising Profits
In New York 2140, Kim Stanley Robinson takes on one of the almost unimaginable yet probable outcomes of climate change: that in the foreseeable future, some ...
The American West from the Air
I recently found myself 1,500 feet above ground, traveling at 180 mph. When I wiped away the breath-mist from the window, I could see the American West …
On the Origin of Extinction
Extinction has never been a purely scientific concept. When theories of extinction exploded onto the Western intellectual scene in the early 19th ...
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 ...
Anthropocene and Empire
In the autumn of 1839, an unusually strong tropical storm devastated coastal communities along the Bay of Bengal in what was then the English East India Company’s premier settlement. A decade later ...
Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way
This is the fifth installment of our blog series An Engineer Reads a Novel. Annie Proulx’s epic novel Barkskins is a sweeping history of our ruinous human appetite for profit and “progress.” ...
Backpacking Across “Stand Your Ground” Territory
The young man’s travel tale is a stalwart of American publishing. There’s the very famous story of two boys on the Mississippi, the Beat novel about road-tripping written on a giant spool of paper ...
Placerita Canyon
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. North of Los Angeles, there is a canyon. It was once occupied by Tataviam Native ...
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 ...