Tree Rings Are Evidence of the Megadrought—and Our Doom
I love trees. I also love dendrochronology—literally, “the study of tree time.” This science, which uses data derived from tree growth rings, provides scientists with a wealth of…
Tag: environment
Seasonal Knowledge and Arab Gulf Almanacs
I am pleased to announce the publication of my new book: Seasonal Knowledge and the Almanac Tradition of the Arab Gulf. Details about the book, including a free…
Cooking Debris in an Australian Cave Tells a Story of Resilience
Starting around 4,000 years ago, Bininj (Aboriginal people in Australia) adapted their diets to include more freshwater plants from wetlands, such as those in the Kakadu region (shown…
Đồng Tháp poses the urgent questions for today.
Juxtaposing decayed US v Soviet war crap or a flower that blooms in slime. a Huey and a MIG and sundry other remnants from the pond in the…
Indigenous Mapmaking, or Bringing a Dead Map to Life
Two Indigenous Marind clan representatives peruse a map of their customary territories produced by local village members. Sophie Chao Excerpted from In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-…
The Yaghan Rise Again
Archaeologist Atilio Francisco Zangrando, foreground, has excavated along the Beagle Channel, or Onashaga in the Yaghan language, since 1998. Katrina Pyne This article was originally publ…
Multispecies Anarchism in the Postnuclear World
Connect the dots between “state”, “imperialism”, and “war”. Add “leaders”, “testosterone” and “nukes”. Look at the picture and tell me anarchism was a bad idea. In effect, as…
Revealing an Ice Age Route for Indigenous Peoples
Research at British Columbia’s Topknot Lake and Little Woss Lake shows what the environment might have been like during the last ice age. Shanna Baker This article was…
An Ecology of Knowledges: An Interview with Micha Rahder
An Ecology of Knowledges: Fear, Love, and Technoscience in Guatemalan Forest Conservation By Micha Rahder, Independent Scholar 336pp. Durham, NC: Duke University Press § Colin Hoag spoke…
Should You Feel Bad About Your Pandemic-Era Plastic Waste?
Plastic waste has grown exponentially across the globe during the pandemic. Matthew Williams-Ellis/Universal Images Group/Getty Images “Sometimes I want to avoid producing excessive waste…
Heritage out of Control: Buddhist Material Excess in Depopulating Japan
Inherited Buddhist objects and their associated ritual care connect the dead with the living. Buddhist things are not only material. They contain spiritual and emotional power, even when…
How “Wilderness” Was Invented Without Indigenous Peoples
Anthropologist Spencer Greening, a member of the Gitga’at First Nation, maps 2,000-year-old fish traps in an intertidal area as part of his graduate studies in Indigenous resource management…
Environment, Labour and Capitalism at Sea (Book Review)
by Connie Scott “Fish simply appear in supermarkets” (p.209), writes Penny McCall Howard. Most consumers have little or no awareness of where their fish comes from, or of…
Heritage out of Control: Human bones as inherited waste of Europe
Central and Eastern Europe – known as “Bloodlands”, the area where Nazi and Stalin’s atrocities met, leaving behind many sites marked by mass killings – provide an obvious…
Heritage out of Control: Don’t trash my holocaust
It was an ordinary, unseasonably cool, summer day in a sleepy town just forty minutes outside of Berlin. Oranienburg once was home to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, one of…
Heritage out of Control: Today’s utopia tomorrow’s waste?
Exploring how beliefs and spiritual dimensions of inequality turn today’s realities of waste into future heritage and (invisible) monuments Cite this article as: Fouad Asfour. January, 2022. ‘Herita…
Images of Loss: Mapping the Future Coast
By Sheehan Moore, CUNY § Ten miles south of New Orleans, on the West Bank of the Mississippi, the trees flanking both sides of Highway 3134 stop abruptly. A…
What a Shipwreck’s Tree Rings Reveal
Tree rings in a cross section of an oak hull plank from the ship Batavia, which sank in 1629, hold clues to the 17th-century timber trade in Europe.…
The Last Wild Lions of Europe
In this ornament found in Mycenae, Greece, lions leap upon their prey. Nancy Thomas Once upon a time, people near the valley of Nemea in southern Greece lived…
A Window on Humanity’s Turbulent 2021
[no-caption] John Finney Photography/Getty Images Amid forest fires, the storming of the U.S. Capitol, private space flights and more, 2021 saw the pandemic bed in. Each time it…
Overcooling of offices reveals gender inequity in thermal comfort
Our appetite for cooling is growing — air conditioning represents the fastest-growing source of energy use in buildings, with cooling energy tripling between 1990 and 2016. In our…
When Carbon Credits Drive People From Their Homes
A sign inside the Alto Mayo Protected Forest promotes “conservation agreements that change lives,” including ecotourism and sustainable coffee. Blanca Begert The Mayo River begins in the …
5 min interview
I get the occasional cold call from secondary school students and always try to respond with some things that are expected and some unexpected. They might miss the…