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...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...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...
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...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...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...Australia Burning
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 ...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...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...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...Deadly Affairs: An Art Exhibition about Toxicity
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...