Spotlight

“We Have Always Known”: On the Trails of People, Plants, and Humboldtby

12 minutes I am trying to focus on my writing, I really am. But my phone buzzes again. This time, the message is difficult to ignore. I see a photograph of my be...

Weathered History: Galveston and Extreme Events

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17 minutes

Texas had seen rain before, plenty. It had flooded before, many times. But on 25 August 2017, Hurricane Harvey dumped a volume of water never before c...

I Still Do a Lot of Good

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5 minutes

Economic thinking permeates our modern societies. It is so pervasive that we do not reflect on the fact that it rules much of what we do. But we might...

Roots through Asphalt: A Conversation with Sonja Dümpelmann

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15 minutes

Sonja Dümpelmann is a landscape historian who is currently working on how grass species have transformed the world, and the history and political impl...

Five Ways of Seeing the Steinsee

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7 minutes

The true eye of the earth is water. Gaston Bachelard I. The Last Shortest Day On my last day as a Landhaus fellow at the Rachel Carson Center, with th...

The Heat Is On!

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21 minutes

It was an unusually hot day in Dresden in July 1903. The glinting Elbe was drifting past Bruehl’s Terrace, famous throughout the world as the “Balcony...

Human Overpopulation: The Elephant in the Greenhouse

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14 minutes

Unlike plagues of the dark ages or contemporary diseases we do not yet understand, the modern plague of overpopulation is soluble by means we have dis...

The Slow Death of an Ethiopian Lake

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14 minutes

I first had the opportunity to visit Lake Ziway when I studied biology as an undergraduate at Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia, in the mid-1990s. Loca...

The Isthmus of Panama and the Knowledge Anthropocene

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18 minutes

In the final chapter of Man and Nature, his landmark 1864 study of an earth transformed by human action, George Perkins Marsh looked ahead to a series...

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...

In Praise of Weeds: Sympoiesis at St. James’s Piccadilly

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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 ...

A Crab’s-Eye View of the Food Chain in Contemporary China

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6 minutes

This article rethinks Chinese foodways and invasive species from a crab’s perspective....

Spaces of Living in Transformation:
Case Studies for Rethinking the Urban in Munich, Germany

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3 minutes

This set of videos captures the everyday sights, sounds, and sensations of two spaces of transformation in Munich, Germany. Produced for the Urban Env...

Under Another Sky

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2 minutes

The Indian village of Piplantri celebrates the birth of every newborn girl by planting 111 trees. In her new film, Under Another Sky, RCC alu...

Is All Environmental Humanities Feminist Environmental Humanities?

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10 minutes

The genealogy of environmental humanities as a field is difficult to map precisely because the field resists singular or definitive categorization wit...