“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...
Roots through Asphalt: A Conversation with Sonja Dümpelmann
by Sonja Dümpelmann and Pauline Kargruber
15 minutes
Sonja Dümpelmann is a landscape historian who is currently working on how grass species have transformed the world, and the history and political impl...Five Ways of Seeing the Steinsee
by Steve Mentz
7 minutes
The true eye of the earth is water. Gaston Bachelard I. The Last Shortest Day On my last day as a Landhaus fellow at the Rachel Carson Center, with th...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...The Isthmus of Panama and the Knowledge Anthropocene
by Paul Sutter
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 series...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 ...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...
Earthworm
by Sumana Roy
1 minute
Earthworm From here, life seems like background noise, speech a fossil from a disobedient time, cleanliness a bed for the frail and aging. And light a...