Spotlight
In the Teeth of History: Dental Decay in the Longue Duréeby Frank Zelko
27 minutes Listen to Elin Kelsey reading this article. The audio version may differ from the written version. In recent years, I have been writing a book on the ...Ecological Constitutionalism: A Necessity
by Jens Kersten
14 minutes
It is no longer a new idea to state that we are living in the Anthropocene—an era in which humanity has become a force of nature. But when we look mor...Adventures in Mockstitutions
by Jenny Price
7 minutes
Welcome to the next stop on our tour today—TOILET—which is on permanent display in the museum and yet very often gets overlooked. TOILET is a great ex...
Not Every Kid Is WEIRD: A Conversation with Francesca Mezzenzana
by Francesca Mezzenzana and Brady Fauth
16 minutes
Francesca Mezzenzana received a PhD in anthropology from the London School of Economics. Her current research project, LearningNatures, investigates c...Rivers as Battlefields: Ukraine’s Dnipro
18 minutes
Wars turn the natural environment into battlefields. In economic wars, regions perceived as rich in resources become contested bounty for powerful pre...Mother Drone, Mother Nature: The Griffon Vulture and Israel’s Military
22 minutes
In July 2020, Israeli television reported on an endangered griffon vulture (Gyps fulvus) chick who had lost his mother to electricity wires. As would ...Home, Roots, Cosmos: A Path through Calvino’s Ecology
15 minutes
The house is Villa Meridiana. You get there by going up a little side street that skirts Via Alessandro Volta, just outside the center of town. It’s u...Yoruba Architectural Sites in Nigeria
14 minutes
Heritage preservation is the strategy of conserving the cultural and environmental history of a certain time and place, and it also has political, spi...Crude Encounters
by Amelia Fiske and Jonas Fischer
3 minutes
Participants on a “toxic tour” of oil operations encounter crude oil for the first time and experience what it means to live amid oil extraction in th...Archive
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....
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...