Spotlight
“We Have Always Known”: On the Trails of People, Plants, and Humboldtby Paula Ungar
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
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
by Nina Wormbs
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
by Sonja Dümpelmann and Pauline Kargruber
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
by Steve Mentz
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!
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
by Helen Tiffin
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
by Hayal Desta
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
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...Archive
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....
Spaces of Living in Transformation:
Case Studies for Rethinking the Urban in Munich, Germany
by Urban Environments Initiative (UEI)
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
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...