Spotlight

Large explosions of bushfire flames shooting high into the sky from an out of control fire on Narrow Neck Plateau, Katoomba, Blue Mountains, Australia

Australia Burningby

21 minutes In November 2019, as forest fires worked their way south along the Great Dividing Range, I walked for a week in the Australian Alps. The wild granite ...

Monarchs of the Great Plains: Plant Power and Colonial Legacies in North America

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17 minutes

Resplendent in shades of orange and black as they float along the breeze, migratory Monarch butterflies have ridden the gusts of transformation over t...

Earthworm

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1 minute

Earthworm From here, life seems like background noise, speech a fossil from a disobedient time, cleanliness a bed for the frail and aging. And light a...

Chicago’s Temple of Steel: South Works since 1882

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13 minutes

In my childhood on summer days, when my mother took us to the shore of Lake Michigan at the 57th Street Beach, we could easily see the billowing plume...

Fishing for Sharks

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17 minutes

Today, the most potent symbol for shark conservation is arguably that of a finned shark—staring out helplessly from black eyes with its appendages sli...

Power Poverty: Energy Injustice in South Africa

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12 minutes

Reflecting on his arrival in Johannesburg from the Eastern Cape in 1941, Nelson Mandela recalled, “We saw before us, glinting in the distance, a maze ...

Ecological Civilization

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19 minutes

Capitalism and communism have been fighting each other for more than a century and a half, until now the fight seems to have exhausted itself. A third...

Why I Sleep Outside

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7 minutes

I can’t quite remember when I first pulled a camping mat and sleeping bag under my covered back deck and hunkered down for the night. That makeshift a...

Cities by the Sea: A Tale of Qingdao and Los Angeles

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12 minutes

When Georg Franzius, a German hydraulic engineer, traveled northward along the Chinese coast in 1897 to settlements scattered around Kiaotschou Bay (t...

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...

Lockdown and Locked In: Houseplants and Covid-19

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12 minutes

Just before the official lockdown was announced in Scotland, I moved all of my office plants home. There was no space for them in my room, but I rearr...