Spotlight

Ecocomics: Vivid Worlds in Images and Textby

24 minutes I grew up on Disney’s Duck Tales (1988–) comics, casually enraptured by the adventures of ducks, mice, and dogs. Later, I encountered the chilling kin...

(Dis)Empowered Communities: A Conversation with Davide Orsini

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20 minutes

Launched in March 2025, Davide’s Volkswagen Foundation Change! project seeks to foster research collaborations between academic and nonacademic partne...

Portrait of an Arctic Research Station

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11 minutes

Tarfala Research Station is nestled in the Tarfala Valley in the Arctic north of Sweden. It is accessed by helicopter or on foot. The hike is challeng...

Eagles, Marmots, Humans: Knowing Wildlife Through Fieldwork

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27 minutes

Katya Karabanina climbed steadily, clinging to a long, straight pine trunk, her safety ropes tight around her waist. Near the top, the nest came ...

Puppets at the Hands of Water: Sex Workers in Mongla, Bangladesh

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17 minutes

On a summer afternoon in 2022, I made the long drive from Jessore to Mongla, a port city in southern Bangladesh. My route took me through Bangladesh’s...

Step Away

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13 minutes

The time of hard-earned success had arrived, and Eve was receiving more invitations to give presentations than she could possibly accept. Her salary h...

Snakey Waters, or: How Marine Biology Structured Global Environmental Sciences

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18 minutes

In the year 1902 an encounter of the monstrous kind aroused the attention of the German Kaiser. The Daily Chronicle announced the sighting of a giant ...

The Neo-Materialist Flip

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10 minutes

At the risk of revealing a lack of intellectual growth, my ideas have not changed so much as shifted since this essay came out. Four years later, the ...

How Wild Is Wild?

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12 minutes

Potter Stewart, a former Justice of the US Supreme Court, famously said of hard-core pornography that it was hard to define but he knew it when he saw...

Stop Saving the Planet!—and Other Tips via Rachel Carson for Twenty-First-Century Environmentalists

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42 minutes

Rachel Carson was a visionary. She’s a towering figure in the modern environmental movement. She’s widely considered to be its founding voice, and she...

Climate-Sensitive Architecture as a Blueprint: Habits, Shades, and the Irresistible Staircase

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15 minutes

Patterns of Desire The relationship of climate to the built environment has been of increasing interest over the past decade. As is generally known, t...

A Dialogue on Form, Knowledge, and Representation

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15 minutes

Gregg Mitman: Disciplines impose a certain form and structure on the world. When we see calls for multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, or transdiscip...

South African Eden: The Kruger National Park

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4 minutes

The world-renowned Kruger National Park—situated on South Africa’s boundary with Mozambique and comprising some 19.000 km²—has its origins in two colo...

Chernobyl

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7 minutes

I grew up in a country that does not exist anymore—East Germany or the GDR. Perhaps this partially explains my interest in Eastern Europe and its envi...

Problematic Postage: Canada’s Claim to the Arctic through a Postage Stamp

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7 minutes

Philatelic materials—postage stamps or documents related to postal history—are often overlooked in terms of their significance and impact on nation-bu...

The Water Shops of Republican Tianjin

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6 minutes

The city of Tianjin was one of China’s treaty ports with foreign concessions in the second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth ce...

What Is Yellow Fever? Disease and Causation in Environmental History

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6 minutes

In many environmental histories, diseases serve to make one of the field’s foundational claims: that nonhuman forces matter in the shaping of human ev...

Filling the Blue Hole in Environmental History

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6 minutes

There is a blue hole in environmental history. It remains a remarkably landlocked discipline, one that largely ignores the seven-tenths of our globe’s...