The Nature of the Copy
From the dead center of an all-white eye, a lone sapling rose two feet tall. Cyclical ridges and valleys, etched in bioplastic by an unseen watchmaker, encircled the…
Tag: environment
Our ‘Fashion Fast’: Week 2
by Amelia Yates **Read about the first week of our ‘fashion fast’ here. If you can, please donate to our efforts to raise money for the labour rights charity Labour Behind the…
CFP: Transformations of Global Food Systems for Climate Change Resilience
CALL FOR PROPOSALS Transformations of Global Food Systems for Climate Change Resilience: Addressing Food Security, Nutrition, and Health Editors: Preety Gadhoke, PhD, MPH (St. John’s University), Bar…
Mapping USA electronics manufacturing pollution
The US ‘tech sector’ has been a major source of toxicant releases. These interactive maps show the chemical legacy of electronic manufacturing in the US.
Dramatising the Future
This is the third in a series of posts by scholars who attended the Anthropocene Campus Melbourne, an event hosted in September by Deakin University as part of…
Description/Classification/Threshold: Experiments with Renewable Energy Taxonomy
This is not renewable energy: Nor is this some clever, Magritte-esque meta-commentary on how it is impossible represent or think about renewable energy separate from the technologies…
Domestication revisited?
Domestication is by most used as a term for the biologically traceable subordination of animals under human control. But anthropologists have for long argued that there are also…
Voided Spaces: Architectural indices of ravines in Guatemala City
Photo by Jorge Villatoro: Ravine in Zone 3, Guatemala City Deep, canyon-like ravines fracture forty-two percent of Guatemala City. Covered in thick, wet, and dense foliage, these ravines…
Forecasting Earth Futures
This is the second in a series of posts by scholars who attended the Anthropocene Campus Melbourne, an event hosted in September by Deakin University as part of…
Using archaeology to understand the past, present, future of climate change
This article originally appeared on The Conversation and has been republished under Creative Commons. A photo from the tragic “Camp Fire,” the most destructive wildfire in California history, shows a…
Not all marine fish eat plastics
The Gulf Stream, which curves along the southern shore of Newfoundland, is saturated with plastics. Fish that feed from the surface waters, where plastics tend to accumulate, are…
Can Honeybees Teach Us How to Live?
“Bees know best,” beekeepers in Bosnia-Herzegovina tend to say. Keen observers of hives, Bosnian beekeepers take bees as knowledgeable beings. The bees, they say, concoct complex hive substances,…
Risk is Your Business: Citizen Science after Fukushima by Maxime Polleri
I began to sweat profusely when my Geiger counter registered a radiation level of 13 microsieverts per hour—a number that indicated a high level of radioactivity. Worried, I glanced…
Hope and mourning in the Anthropocene
These experiences resonate strongly with the concept of “solastagia,” described both as a form of homesickness while still in place, and as a type of grief over the…
A Relationship with Fashion: Thoughts from an Anthropology Student
by Silvia Irina Berástegui I arrived in Brighton 5 years ago with the dream of finding a good job and starting an autonomous life of my own. During…
Secrets Hidden in Ancient Teeth
Fossilized tooth crowns hold lots of information about past climates and life events. Tanya M. Smith This article was originally published at The Conversation and has been republished under Creative…
Science with heart
Conservation biologist Alex Bond on dealing with pollution, harm, and suffering as a scientist.
Why Don’t More Humans Eat Bugs?
Ten years ago, toiling in scorching heat on the parched Fongoli savanna in southeast Senegal, anthropologist Julie Lesnik faced an unpalatable task. She had to taste a termite.…
The Dream of the Green Hog Revolution
[no-caption] Ezra Weiss This September, as Hurricane Florence bore down on the North Carolina coast, it spread a soup of stinking effluent from at least 110 lagoons on…
Nuclear State, Nuclear Waste
Nuclear State, Nuclear Waste: Emily Simmonds on Canada as a nuclear nation & ongoing colonialism through uranium mining.
For Chimps, Human Touch Can Hurt
At a sanctuary in Cameroon, caregiver Henriette holds Gnala, a 2-year-old chimpanzee who had previously lived in a human household as a pet. Amy Hanes/Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue The…
Waste colonialism
Waste colonialism refers to how waste and pollution are part of the domination of one group in their homeland by another group. The concept has been gaining traction…
What the world misses about recycling
Recycling was never just a solution to a disposal crisis, and it did not uniformly reduce total waste management costs. Rather, it addresses a range of other concerns…
The Oldest True Stories in the World
Australia’s iconic Opera House is lit up with an art installation called Songlines during a festival in 2016. For Aboriginal Australians, songlines are memories of routes through landscapes—which…