Spotlight
The Magic Mirror: Legends, Limnology, and Nuclear Power on Lake Stechlinby Jessica Lee
15 minutes On the horizon of the small German village of Neuglobsow, the chimney of the Rheinsberg nuclear power plant rises above the surrounding beech and pine...Talking Fungus: Finding Language for a Troubled Kingdom
10 minutes
Language greatly colours the way we perceive life. Words and concepts shape our perception of nature, and not all organisms receive equal consideratio...
Seeing with a Forager’s Eye: A Conversation with Martin Saxer
by Martin Saxer and Christof Mauch
17 minutes
Martin Saxer leads the research project “Foraging at the Edge of Capitalism,” based at the Rachel Carson Center (RCC). When this project began, he rem...The Value of Fragments: Making a Hotspot in Mount Nimba, Liberia
by Emmanuelle Roth and Gregg Mitman
28 minutes
Faint high-pitched sounds echo up from the cavernous pit into which we peer. At twilight’s edge, the dry season’s intense midday sun has mellowed into...Beavering
11 minutes
Spring is approaching. The beavers have left a single stick about a meter long across the pond outlet, marking their intentions. “No mud yet, but we a...The Poetics of Dunes
11 minutes
I grew up by the sea, in the warm south of Portugal, swimming in the ocean and playing in the sand. I didn’t know then that my childhood playground wa...Archive
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 ...A Crab’s-Eye View of the Food Chain in Contemporary China
6 minutes
This article rethinks Chinese foodways and invasive species from a crab’s perspective....