Why Did Passenger Pigeons Go Extinct?
Nineteenth-century hunters in Louisiana shoot passenger pigeons. Smith Bennett/Wikimedia Commons This article was originally published at The Conversation and has been republished under C…
Tag: environment
Grass Trilogy
If you missed the “Introduction to Grass Trilogy,” you can find it here. By Ochirbatyn Dashbalbar Translated by Jessica Madison Pískatá 1. Grass O grass—presently my dear father,…
Introduction to Grass Trilogy
The sacred mountain Altan Ovoo rises in the Dariganga region of eastern Mongolia. Jessica Madison Pískatá I first arrived in eastern Mongolia in August 2011 by way of…
How to Make Climate Change Feel Real
The year is 2018. The world’s leaders are gathered, yet again, to try to solve the crisis of climate change. But this time, the United Nations secretary-general is…
The Tragic Intersection of the Coronavirus and Ecotourism
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, ecotourists like these, shown here viewing an Asian elephant, packed river boats on the Kinabatangan River in Borneo, Malaysia. Mark Sisson/Minden Pictures/AP …
Yoik
Deep in the Arctic Circle, in the far north of Scandinavia, people belonging to the Sámi ethnic group herd reindeer. Nowadays only a minority of Sámi people still…
Book Review: Breathtaking: Asthma Care in a Time of Climate Change by Alison Kenner
In Breathtaking: Asthma Care in a Time of Climate Change, Alison Kenner uses a multi-sited ethnography to examine the myriad infrastructures and material practices of care in the…
Why Poetry + Anthropology?
[no-caption] Kim Herbst When a barbed-wire de facto border lights up but throbs with blood, when a lynching memorial veins into memories and questions of the soul, when…
The Fish Trap
An equatorial moon arcs above the Upper Rio Negro region of Brazil. Glenn H. Shepard Jr. The U.S. poet-physician William Carlos Williams once described a poem as a…
Who feeds (on) whom? Labour and the porosity of environments and bodies by Victoria Stead
Hannah Landecker writes about the new metabolism as “a model in which food enters the body and in a sense never leaves it, because food transforms the organism’s…
Gasping for Air in the Time of COVID-19
The impact of the virus is having suffocating effects in more ways than one. Sorbetto/Getty Images Panic about COVID-19, a novel flu-like disease that emerged in Wuhan, China,…
When Marine Mammals Clash With Archaeological Heritage
Sea lion populations off the California coast bounced back after the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972. NOAA/NOS/NMS/CINMS; National Marine Sanctuaries Media Library Off the southern C…
How Eating Rat Stew Serves Hobbit Research
Kamelus Nampung, one of the Manggarai people who live on the Indonesian island of Flores, cooks a giant rat. Paige Madison “Don’t forget to save every last bone!”…
The Bitter Side of Cocoa Production
Chocolate comes from processing the seeds found in the fruit, or “pods” (shown here), of the cacao tree. USAID/Flickr A fine piece of chocolate tickles your tongue with…
“We will always put economic growth ahead of environmental concerns”
It may sound strange, but wouldn’t it be nice if Trump’s disconnect between endless economic growth and environmental crisis stemmed from pure ignorance. At least if this was…
What Really Happened at Herculaneum?
The volcanic Mount Vesuvius is visible above the ruins of Pompeii, now an archaeological site in Italy. Marc Proudfoot/Flickr When Mount Vesuvius, on the west coast of Italy,…
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…
Collecting waste in Sicily: old and new ways
BY FREEK COLOMBIJN Every human settlement has to think of a way to dispose its solid waste, but each place finds its own particular ways to do this.…
Sending surplus food to charity is not the way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions
While giving food that would otherwise go to landfill to hungry people may be a convenient part of a solution to reduce greenhouse gases, it will do little…
What Modern Extremes Taught Me About Noise in the Ancient World
Today the cacophony of modern life makes it difficult to find, much less achieve, true silence. In our electrified world, there is always a rattle or hum somewhere.…
Humans in 2019—From Discoveries to Disasters
This image shows various views of the pinky bone of a Denisovan-Neanderthal hybrid found in Siberia. Thomas Higham/University of Oxford Denisovan Deluge This year brought a host of…
Book Forum: Daniel Renfrew’s Life Without Lead: Contamination, Crisis, and Hope in Uruguay by Andrés Romero
Introduction Daniel Renfrew’s Life Without Lead: Contamination, Crisis, and Hope in Uruguay (2018) is a masterful undertaking on the anthropology of disaster and its everydayness. An ethnograp…
Why Did Chinese Farmers Switch to Wheat?
Wheat is now a favored crop in many parts of China. Jie Zhao/Getty Images Today China is the world’s biggest consumer of wheat, which the country uses to…
The Flygskam Scam
In reading and thinking about my eco-anxiety, I’ve recently learned of a Swedish neologism that describes a new way of thinking about air travel: flygskam: flight guilt. I…