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...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...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...18 minutes
Wars turn the natural environment into battlefields. In economic wars, regions perceived as rich in resources become contested bounty for powerful pre...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...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...14 minutes
Sometime in 2018 I joined a tour of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. Guided by art historian Ingrid Greenfield, it highlighted the role of trade betwee...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...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 ...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...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...by Cameron Muir
5 minutes
On Lord Howe Island, 600 kilometres off of Australia’s east coast, you can snorkel the world’s southernmost coral reef, clamber up a basalt mountain t...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...