Natural Disasters Are Less Natural Than You Think
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…
Tag: environment
Climate Swings Drove Early Humans Out of Africa (and Back Again)
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…
In Deforestation’s Wake, Wild Animals Turn Troublesome
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…
North Dakota Access Pipeline Protests Spark Historic Declaration
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…
Modern Waste and Industrial Ruins in the Anthropocene
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…
Top of the Heap: Matthew Kohrman by Hannah Gibson
[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…
Reviving food diversity through Indigenous knowledge
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…
Decolonial Atlas
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 Bombing in U.S. National Parks
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…
What Can Vampire Bats Teach Us About Friendship?
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 …
Will GMOs Put an End to Hunger? Ask the Hungry
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…
Animal Trafficking Is Big Business on Instagram
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…
Environmentality
Governmentality and environmentality can articulate how and why waste becomes a medium through which to understand power and changing human-waste interactions
Lost or Found? A Stick Chart From the Marshall Islands
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…
Searching for the Origins of the First Americans
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…
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…
Interplanetary Environmentalism (Part 2)
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…
Arizona’s Inmate Firefighters
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…
Good Earth: Exploring the Old Lead Belt
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…
Why aren’t millennials buying diamonds?
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…
Interplanetary Environmentalism (Part 1)
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…
Why Dwarfism?
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…
Thom van Dooren’s Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the End of Extinction by Eva Giraud
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…
Climate Wars
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…