Spotlight
Rain, Carson, Art, Salt: A Venetian Matrixby Catherine Bush
22 minutes Early September 2024: When, on the morning of my third day in Venice, I wake and grab my phone to check the weather app, I am met by the same orange b...The Unbearable Weight of Displaced Weather
by Mike Hulme
11 minutes
Through apps, webcams, and other forms of digital mediation, the weather is always with us. Yet, more significantly, it is not just “our” weather that...The Nutmeg’s Curse
by Amitav Ghosh
8 minutes
The story of The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021) begins almost exactly 400 years ago, in a very faraway place—so far away that very few of you are likely...Walking a Sicilian River
by Paolo Gruppuso and Erika Garozzo
13 minutes
On the sandy shoreline of eastern Sicily, the Simeto River meets the Ionian Sea against the dramatic backdrop of the volcano Etna. Groves of reeds sur...Killing a Baboon: Applied History and the Anthropocene Ape
by Sandra Swart
36 minutes
#JusticeForRaygun is trending in South Africa. He was a young male baboon who had left his mother’s troop and set off, on a journey to adulthood. This...
Organic Farming in Thailand: A Conversation with Judith Bopp
by Judith Bopp and Mascha Gugganig
20 minutes
Judith’s background in cultural geography and (eco)linguistics, and Mascha’s training in sociocultural anthropology, and science and technology studie...Archive
The Neo-Materialist Flip
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?
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
by Jenny Price
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
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
by Gregg Mitman and Rob Nixon
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
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
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
by Daniel Dumas
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
by Mu Cao
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
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
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...In Praise of Weeds: Sympoiesis at St. James’s Piccadilly
by Kate Rigby
6 minutes
At 7:54 p.m. on 14 October 1940, the church of St. James’s Piccadilly, in the heart of London, was hit by high explosive and incendiary bombs. By the ...