Cultures of Tarhana: A Tale of Humans and Microbes
18 minutes
The cultures of tarhana—a fermented instant soup base—come with a long-practiced culinary tradition in the Middle East and the Balkans. Although often...Stew of the Earth
11 minutes
Besides the leaves that a bag gathers, all you need for a cup of tea is hot water, and in the town of Furnas the earth boils it directly. I ...
Seeing with a Forager’s Eye: A Conversation with Martin Saxer
by Martin Saxer and Christof Mauch
17 minutes
Martin Saxer leads the research project “Foraging at the Edge of Capitalism,” based at the Rachel Carson Center (RCC). When this project began, he rem...
In the Teeth of History: Dental Decay in the Longue Durée
by Frank Zelko
27 minutes
In recent years, I have been writing a book on the history of water fluoridation, a practice that is dental dogma in a handful of countries, particula...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...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...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...Human Overpopulation: The Elephant in the Greenhouse
by Helen Tiffin
14 minutes
When it comes to the environmental crisis, human overpopulation remains a topic discreetly avoided in public debate. But, as Reverend Martin Luther Ki...Crude Encounters
by Amelia Fiske and Jonas Fischer
3 minutes
Encountering crude oil out of place: Wind your way through the forest, grasses skimming against your legs, the chatter of squirrel monkeys above your ...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...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...