Native Americans from many different tribes have unified behind the Standing Rock Sioux tribe’s protest in North Dakota against the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline. The controversial…
Regarding Giant Mine, the Canadian government’s plan for containment involves freezing the arsenic underground in perpetuity. Beyond the technical challenges, the question of how to communicate risk a…
[For this instalment of the Top of the Heap series, I spoke with medical anthropologist and Associate Professor Matthew Kohrman from Stanford University.] Summer has arrived in North…
This NPR piece — How Native American Tribes Saved A Giant, Ancient Squash From Oblivion — offers an interesting example for thinking about the everyday impacts of colonization…
This blog — The Decolonial Atlas — is a really interesting tool for discussions of representation. As the authors explain, The Decolonial Atlas, started in 2014, is an…
Graffiti in U.S. national parks has become increasingly common. Carving into rocks or writing and painting on them leaves images and impressions that are difficult to remove—forever changing…
How did human friendship evolve? Vampire bats offer a unique opportunity to study the phenomenon of friendship through observing their strong social bonds. Josh More/Flickr Gerald Carter …
When it comes to food, few topics are as contentious and polarizing as genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. Hyperbole is rampant in this debate. GMOs are everything we…
Social media platforms can be used to perpetuate the trafficking of animals and animal products such as bear bile, which is commonly harvested from Asiatic black bears. Lee…
Governmentality and environmentality can articulate how and why waste becomes a medium through which to understand power and changing human-waste interactions
In a recent blog post, I focused on the Global Positioning System (GPS) and mused on how we ever got along without high-tech navigational aids. GPS units became…
Since the 1920s, scientists have debated whether the first Americans arrived from Asia—or somewhere else—some 11,000 years ago, or millennia before. Artifacts such as this Clovis spear point…
One person’s trash is another’s treasure… or data, if you are an archaeologist or anthropologist working in a landfill. Places where trash builds up can provide archaeologists important…
If you missed my previous post, please see Interplanetary Environmentalism (Part 1). The subsurface oceans of Enceladus, Europa, and other worlds may be home to microbes, similar to…
In the state of Arizona, all able-bodied incarcerated people are required to work. Most prison jobs are monotonous and consist of low-skill, assembly line–style labor. The hourly wage…
Figure 1. Park Hills, Missouri, 120 Buckley Street. The entire street borders the Desloge Chat Pile, which has been remediated by the Environmental Protection Agency and partially transformed…
link to original tweet @TheEconomist Earlier this week, The Economist magazine asked the Twittersphere a question: Why aren’t millennials buying diamonds? Unsurprisingly, this question generat…
On Earth we sometimes identify and protect places we recognize as holding special cultural, scientific, religious, political, historical, or heritage value. By doing so, we hope to preserve…
In the immortal words of Lennon and McCartney, “I read the news today, oh boy.” By now, you have probably read the news, too, about the discovery of…
Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the End of Extinction by Thom van Dooren Columbia University Press, 2014. 208 pages. Flight Ways begins with a question: at what moment should…
Fiji’s human history is directly linked to the ebbs and flows of climate change—particularly of sea-level rise. Throughout the Pacific Islands, fluctuating environmental conditions resulting from…
By Jeremy Trombley, University of Maryland, College Park § My research looks at the entities and interactions that constitute the Chesapeake Bay watershed – specifically the role that computational mo…
This is the second installment of a food journal I kept during several days in February camping with a bomb clearance team in Laos. If you missed my…
Uber is part of a “gig economy” trend in India and elsewhere—an economy partially powered by self-employed workers on short-term jobs. While it offers flexible schedules for its…