Surviving Climate Change in Italy
On a cold, wet afternoon in February 2014, Andrew Mathews stood on a mountain in Tuscany and looked out over the valley below. An environmental anthropologist and a…
Tag: environment
The End of the World As We Know It
[no-caption] David Williams/SAPIENS Listen to the companion episode of SAPIENS: A Podcast for Everything Human! Back in 2008, Chad Huddleston was driving home from work when he saw a stra…
Race, Rural Livelihoods, and Contested Conservation Landscapes
A visit to Basu Farms in Pembroke Township, about 60 miles south of Chicago, provides a glimpse into the entanglement of land tenure, black history and self-determination in…
Environmental Panics : The emission scandal in Germany
In September and again in November 2015 the famous German car company, Volkswagen AG at its headquarter in Virginia, received two violation notices from the United States Environmental…
How Globalization Has Broken the Chain of Responsibility
Industrialization’s footprint has heavily impacted Gladstone, a city on the east coast of Australia. James Morgan/Getty Images In Gladstone, a small city in Queensland, Australia, even th…
Why Is This Trash Can Yelling at Me? Big Bellies and Clean Green Gentrification
“Pssst. There’s something really special happening here. I’m collecting five times more trash than the other guys and using solar energy to compact it all. Welcome to downtown…
Processing Settler Toxicities: Part I
This 2+ part post is adapted from a presentation at the 2018 Cultures of Energy Symposium at Rice University. Many thanks to everyone who responded to my call…
Carbon Farmers Work to Clean Up the World’s Mess
It was a bright afternoon in March of 2011 when I met Pedro (a pseudonym) on his organic farm in the mountains of Costa Rica, north of San…
How Volcanoes Destroy and Nurture Societies
The explosion must have been deafening. Clouds of black and gray likely erased the horizon as the earth and sky thundered violently. As smoldering debris rained down on…
Ethnographic Designs for Buen Vivir: Fieldnotes from Nicaragua
Co-Authored by Alex Nading, Josh Fisher, and Chantelle Falconer What does it mean to find value in urban ecologies? This question sparked our collaborative research in Ciudad Sandino,…
What Clam Thermometers Tell Us About Past Climates
It’s mid-August, 2017, but the temperature in Unalaska, one of the Aleutian Islands that trails off of the western Alaskan coast, is a brisk 50 degrees Fahrenheit. Christine…
Archaeology’s Search for History Hidden in Ice
When Ötzi the Iceman, the most complete Neolithic mummy ever found, melted out of the Tyrolean Alps in 1991, the field of “ice patch archaeology” was born. In…
Parrotfish: The Charisma of Conservation in the Caribbean
During the week of Easter, the beaches of the Dominican Republic were converted into billboards for the campaign to stop the consumption of parrotfish. Pictures taken from drones…
How Fracking’s Appetite for Sand Is Devouring Rural Communities
[no-caption] “Do you want to see the mine?” asks Harlan*. “Of course,” I reply. He fetches his boots. We head outside with his wife Edith and follow a…
How a Eurasian Steppe Empire Coped With Decades of Drought
[no-caption] Tuul & Bruno Morandi /Getty Images The bitterly cold, dry air of the Central Asian steppe is a boon to researchers who study the region. The frigid…
Western Science Is Finally Catching Up to Traditional Ecological Knowledge
Indigenous groups in northern Australia have observed—and even indicated in ceremony and story—kites and falcons, or “firehawks,” deliberately transporting lit sticks in order to spread fire. …
How Chinese Immigrants Built—and Lost—a Shellfish Industry
Abalone, which were once abundant in the coastal waters of California, are now primarily cultivated on farms. Universal Images Group/Getty Images At a sleepy outpost in the Sierra…
Where a River of Life Became a Border of Control
[no-caption] Wenting Li/SAPIENS The floor of the El Paso International Airport’s baggage claim area is a marble mosaic design; blue stones represent the Rio Grande (or Río Bravo,…
New book on Water Justice
This looks like quite a nice collection from Cambridge University Press. Water Justice Edited by Rutgerd Boelens, Tom Perreault, and Jeroen Vos Book description Water justice is becoming…
Susanna Trnka’s One Blue Child: Asthma, Responsibility, and the Politics of Global Health by Paul Mason
One Blue Child: Asthma, Responsibility, and the Politics of Global Health By Susanna Trnka Stanford University Press, 2017, 262 pages. Bringing children to the field can change…
Beach by Meg Samuelson
Beaches are good places to think with about waste and ruination. They were once generically places of waste (in the etymological sense of “unoccupied, uncultivated”) while recognized as…
What Really Happened on Easter Island?
The famous statues of Easter Island have long been a source of awe and wonder. John Elk III/Alamy Photos This article was originally published at The Conversation and has been…
Body by Joshua O. Reno
It is increasingly impossible to think of the problem of waste, or discarded and denigrated materials, separately from the problem of race, or discarded and denigrated people. There…
Yellow Water: Rupture and Return One Year after the Gold King Mine Spill
Figure 1. A view of Animas Creek taken one year after the August 2015 Gold King Mine spill that discharged three million gallons of acid mine water toward…