Ten Things about Collaborating for Climate Solutions
Heather Lazrus is an environmental anthropologist who studies perceptions of and responses to extreme weather in the context of a changing climate. Image description: An illustrated portrait of…
Tag: climate change
The Social Lives of Climate Reports
IPCC reports are hailed as objective, empirical evidence. But the social life of their production and circulation has much to do with conflicting politics, values, and choices. In…
Unsustainable City
In New York, the sustainable city is being built on its own undoing. In 2014, residents of Staten Island’s Elm Park neighborhood found their cars covered in dust.…
Scientists Predict the Future for Antarctic Ice
The Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass at an accelerating rate. How do scientists explain and engage with this increasingly urgent climate crisis? Antarctic ice looms. Literally. Much…
Forensic Anthropology in a Changing Climate
In 2018, a wildfire swept through Northern California. Forensic anthropologists were called in to identify skeletal remains in a devastated recovery scene. In a smoke-filled parking lot, our…
My Petrochemical Love
For women of color on Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, everyday environmental and climate activism is entangled with intimate lives. It is April, and it is hot and humid in…
The Long View of Climate Change and Human Health
The deterministic view that climate change invariably causes migration, competition, violence, and collapse is overly simplistic. Bioarchaeology shows us that human responses are far more complex and …
After Oil
To navigate the growing storms of climate change, St. Croix is doubling down on the fiscal promise of oil. Residents demand otherwise. St. Croix stands at a climate…
Death of a Glacier
In 2014, the first of Iceland’s named glaciers suffered death by human-made climate change. Two anthropologists decided to mark its passing. Sometime around the year 2000, no one…
The life of the coral body by Cameron Allan McKean
Life comes apart on the reef. Changes to ocean chemistry and temperature—generated by the fossil-hunger of militarism, extractivism, and industrialism—break open coral worlds on Australia’s northeast…
Seeking Urban Metabolisms through Archaeology by Sarah Hayes
The metabolism of a city is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in its archaeology. Decades of excavations triggered by cultural heritage management legislation in Melbourne, Australia reveal a…
Alison Kenner’s Breathtaking: Asthma Care in a Time of Climate Change by Susanna Trnka
Breathtaking: Asthma Care in a Time of Climate Change Alison Kenner University of Minnesota Press, 2018. 236 pages. Asthma is thought to affect an estimated 339 million people…
What Anthropology Teaches Us about COVID-19, Part 2: An Optimist’s Scenario
Here’s what I imagine could–and should–emerge from this viral nightmare. Locally, stranger-neighbors will (re)discover each other. Re-appreciate the bonds of co-residence. …
Web Roundup: What Can the Coronavirus Outbreak Tell Us About Capitalism, White Supremacy, and Climate Change? by Anika Jugovic-Spajic
In December 2019, a new respiratory virus outbreak began in the Chinese city of Wuhan, Hubei Province. A new strain of coronavirus, designated COVID-2019, belongs to a large…
Eco-Horror: Facing Climate Change in Minas Gerais, Brazil
Storm clouds over Minas Gerais. Photo by Mariela Guimarães (Pedro Rocha Franco and Jefferson Delbem 2020). The January 2020 floods in Minas Gerais, Brazil were catastrophic for the…
Cities and Water in a Time of Climate Change
International PhD Academy June 1–5, 2020 in Venice last call for Applications until February 15, 2020 via VIU website! Join this unique opportunity for a broad global comparison of…
The Memory of Fire: Burning Backwards into the Future
Fire breathes oxygen. Fire consumes organic material. Fire ages and dies. Fire runs, jumps, and simmers. Fire responds differentially to external irritants. Fire has moods. Among many of…
Call for Reviews: Anthropology of Climate Change and the Environment
As 2020 started with the apocalyptic images of the Australian bush-fires, we at Allegra, felt there was an emergency to feature the work of environmental anthropologists so as…
2019 in Review: Hopepunk
By Emma Louise Backe Avengers: Infinity War (2018)—the penultimate movie in the Avengers Marvel franchise—ended in defeat, the assorted heroes unable to stop Thanos from using the Infinity…
Why the Earth Must Be Mapped
A lidar scan of a site in Mexico reveals the boundaries of a ceremonial area. Chris Fisher The climate crisis represents humanity’s greatest threat. Our daily news is…
Global Giants: American Empire and Transnational Capital
Review of Giants: The Global Power Elite by Peter Phillips (Introduction by William I. Robinson). New York: Seven Stories Press, 2018. LCCN 2018017493; ISBN 9781609808716 (pbk.); ISBN 9781609808723…
Archiving for the Anthropocene: Notes from the Field Campus
On a chilly Sunday afternoon in March, our Field Campus group walked through downtown Granite City, Illinois. Located just 6 miles north of St. Louis, the downtown was…
Future Arctic Ecosystems revisited or reindeer herding at the verge of extinction?
30 Oct, 14:00, Rovaniemi, Arktikum, 2nd floor, coffee room. The world’s northernmost herding horses? at work in herding reindeer, Kharaulakh, Laptev Sea In this Wednesday Afternoon Coffee Chat…
Clive Spash on the Lies they Tell: The pitiful state of environmentalism and its neoliberalization
Clive Spash, never one to leave you wondering what he thinks, on how environmentalism has been captured by new forms of economic reasoning. Always worth revisiting his critique…