By Lorenzo D’Angelo, University of Milano-Bicocca The continued economic and ecological crises of recent years have again shown how economists and international leaders have overestimated the ability …
Cholera threat in Haiti Haitians displaced by Hurricane Matthew, Source: Andres Martinez Casares/Reuters ABC News says relief efforts in Haiti are “ramping up” one week after Hurricane M…
Glad you’re here! Check out some of our favorite episodes in any order and get to know the anthropological life. And, if you’re long-time listeners we hope you’ll enjoy…
South Australia’s Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission has recommended the state investigate an international storage site for intermediate and high-level (spent fuel) nuclear waste.
While the conversation on antibiotic resistance has started, one part of the story has not been highlighted. The risks to human and ecosystem health are strongly connected to…
Exposed Science: Genes, the Environment, and the Politics of Population Health by Sara Shostak University of California Press, 2013, 312 pages “Genetics loads the gun, but the…
Road infrastructure, hydroelectric development, and climate change all factored into the floods and landslides that struck the Indian Himalayas in 2013, killing at least 5,748 people. Paul Co…
The textbook narrative of human history tells us that between 70,000 and 60,000 years ago our earliest modern human ancestors traveled out of Africa on a journey that…
Clear-cutting of forests in West Papua for large-scale oil palm cultivation is in some cases turning local wildlife into orphans, reshaping the relationship between local communities and the envi…
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…