How COVID-19 Is Changing People’s Relationships With Houseplants
“Since when did people start naming plants?” my mother asked me. We were at the dining room table, scrolling through pictures of plants on my iPhone. The photos—close-ups…
Tag: environment
Wildfire Archaeology and the Burning American West
As I type, the American West is ablaze with more than 100 devastating wildfires. Many of these are record-setting in both size and intensity. Several, including one in…
Environments that Could’ve Been
Speculation is inevitable in social science. Infinite variables exceed what a researcher can grasp, making confidence hard to attain. There are always gaps in our knowledge of reality,…
So long, Indiana Jones, or who owns “El Mirador”?
The rule of “finders, keepers” has held true for most archaeological discoveries at least since museums, as we now know them, have existed. Collectors of foreign objects have…
Book Review: Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West by Justin Farrell
In Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West, Justin Farrell examines the lives of the ultra-wealthy who make Teton County, Wyoming, the richest county…
Book Review: The Licit Life of Capitalism: US Oil in Equatorial Guinea by Hannah Appel
In The Licit Life of Capitalism: US Oil in Equatorial Guinea, economic anthropologist Hannah Appel closely examines the operations of US oil companies in Equatorial Guinea, not only…
Being Clear-Eyed About Citizen Science in the Age of COVID-19
In March 2011, one of the strongest earthquakes on record struck the Fukushima Dai’ichi Nuclear Power Plant in northeastern Japan. Combined with a subsequent tsunami, the disasters triggered…
A Nepalese Region Reclaims Its Holy Water
The Budhi Gandaki River, shown here downstream from Nubri Valley, rushes with icy turquoise water. Madison Wrobley “I’ve been told this is the longest suspended water system in…
Science and Justice: “Impartial” Water Monitoring and Resistance to the Escobal Mine in Guatemala
Editor’s note: This is the third post in an ongoing series called “The Spectrum of Research and Practice in Guatemalan Science Studies.” The surface installation of the Escobal…
#Review: An Ecology of Knowledges
Micha Rahder’s An Ecology of Knowledges: Fear, Love, and Technoscience in Guatemalan Forest Conservation is an ethnographically rich account of the dense conservation networks and politics that operat…
What Parsnips Taught Me About Nature
Growing and harvesting this food helped the author connect with nature. Stuart Lang As the rain fell on my hands, washing away the soil, I threw the last…
Can an “Invasive Species” Earn the Right to Stay?
Macaques sit near Florida’s Silver River. Rachel Simmons/Flickr Steve Johnson never thought he’d have to worry about death threats, not in his line of work. Johnson is a…
Could the Coronavirus Pandemic Be Good for the Environment?
[no-caption] Angus Greig SAPIENS host Chip Colwell interviews Elic Weitzel, a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the University of Connecticut, about his recent article for SAPIENS tha…
Rio Tinto: the Highest stage of rampant plunder Capitalism of the very worst kind
by Calla Wahlquist @callapilla Rio Tinto blasts 46,000-year-old Aboriginal site to expand iron ore mine Mining company was given permission to blast Juukan Gorge cave, which provided a…
Are Pandemics Good for the Environment?
Mountain goats roam the streets of Llandudno, in north Wales, in the absence of tourists. Christopher Furlong/Getty Images In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, many have noted…
Events of Disruptive Transformation by Zoltán Boldizsár Simon
We have been discussing the prospects of catastrophes of our own making for decades. We have been debating risks linked to anthropogenic climate change and runaway technologies, trying…
How Kings Created Angkor Wat—Then Lost It
The impressive temples at Angkor Wat make it famous—but there is much more to the site. Vincent Gerbouin/Pexels Over a thousand years ago, the ancient Khmer civilization emerged…
Searching for the Sources of Water Scarcity
Residents in Mumbai collect water at a community tank. Kuni Takahashi/Getty Images Nikhil Anand, an environmental and urban anthropologist, grew up in Mumbai, India. In 2007, after studyi…
Do I Have Microremains in My Teeth?
Southwestern Finland isn’t a great place for archaeologists to find anything other than the sturdiest of remains. The pine needles that fall to the boreal forest floor make…
The Enduring Mystery of the Human-Horse Story
Archaeologists unearth an ancient habitation site in Western Mongolia, seeking clues to the early history of domestic horses. William Taylor This article was originally published at The C…
Clean in Times of Covid-19: on Hygiene and Pollution by Mandy de Wilde
As the coronavirus pandemic spreads, air pollution and greenhouse emissions decrease, or so news reports say. The satellite images of China in lockdown provided a first striking example. In…
Silent Spring in Europe calls for a New Social Ecology by Tanja Bogusz
Deserted streets in Rome, empty dance-halls in Berlin, died-out tourist attractions in Barcelona, and a lonely Eiffel-Tower in Paris: Europe is experiencing its first locked-down spring. It marks…
Black Geographies: New Maroon Studies and the Politics of Place
Jamaican Maroons are the descendants of Africans who escaped enslavement on plantations in the early colonial period. Mentions of the Maroons in the colonial record begin around 1655,…
Blinded
For the past eight years, I have had the opportunity to bear witness to the metamorphic stages of the construction of Doha, the capital of Qatar, a peninsular…