“We Have Always Known”: On the Trails of People, Plants, and Humboldt
by 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...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...Monarchs of the Great Plains: Plant Power and Colonial Legacies in North America
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...Chicago’s Temple of Steel: South Works since 1882
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...
Power Poverty: Energy Injustice in South Africa
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 ...Fishing for Sharks
by Miles Powell
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...Ecological Civilization
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...Cities by the Sea: A Tale of Qingdao and Los Angeles
by Shen Hou
12 minutes
When Georg Franzius, a German hydraulic engineer, traveled northward along the Chinese coast in 1897 to settlements scattered around Kiaotschou Bay (t...