What Indigenous Languages Reveal About Bear Genetics
[no-caption] Alh1/Flickr This article was originally published at Hakai Magazine and has been republished with permission. Along the central coast of British Columbia, grizzly bears go by…
Tag: environment
Stop Calling the Aleutians Pristine
Most of the Aleutian Islands are today unpopulated. Ariel Taivalkoski The Aleutian Islands, which stretch 1,100 miles across the Bering Sea from the Alaska Peninsula, are commonly describ…
What Do Goats and Wars Have to Do With Glacier Loss?
A local guide stands near Shali Kangri glacier in the Ladakh region of the Indian Himalayas. Hélène Lapierre-Messier For scientists, the layers of ice that make up glaciers…
Plastic Pollution Goes Far Beyond Litter by Gauri Pathak
Plastics in the oceans. Beaches littered with plastics. Images of whales and cows with plastics in their bellies. Calls for citizens not to litter, to throw away trash…
Miss Tampon Liberty
In the 1980s, when menstruation was generally considered taboo, artist Jay Critchley made art out of discarded plastic tampon applicators washed up and collected on local beaches. With…
ECOLOGICAL TERRORIST – AFFORESTATION AND EUCALYPTUS
“Man not only survives and functions in his environment, he shapes it and he is shaped by it.” — Renè Dubos My first venture into the rural outskirts…
How Early Humans Shaped the World With Fire
Ancient humans used fire for warmth and food preparation, but also as a tool to shape the physical environment. Jessica Thompson This article was originally published at The…
How to Survive Climate Change in the India-Bangladesh Borderlands
Homes along a river in the Sundarbans face a concrete embankment that protects land on the opposite side from rising waters. Megnaa Mehtta The Sundarbans is a region…
An Excavation of the COVID-19 Pandemic
[no-caption] Kim Herbst With over 131 million people fully vaccinated in the U.S. and numbers of new infections dropping nationwide, some have started to declare the “end” of…
A Letter From COVID-19
[no-caption] Beastfromeast/Getty Images In June 2020, I published a “Letter From COVID-19” in the Italian newspaper la Repubblica. At the time of writing, Italy was still under lockdown…
Reading Lists: Waste Colonialism and Palestine
When there’s conflict, academics and teachers will often put together a reading list or syllabus to show the breadth and depth of knowledge on a topic that is…
Inviting disasters
One particularly warm morning in September 2020, I am looking at photographs and videos in the media depicting the aftermath of medicane (Mediterranean hurricane) Ianós that just rampaged…
Book Review: Mekong Dreaming: Life and Death Along a Changing River by Andrew Alan Johnson
In Mekong Dreaming: Life and Death Along a Changing River, Andrew Alan Johnson offers a new anthropological study that explores how infrastructural projects – in this case, hydropower dams…
Why the Camp Grant Massacre Matters Today
In 2015, members of the Apache Nation and their allies protested actions by the U.S. Congress that granted parts of Oak Flat to Resolution Copper Mining. Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty…
A West African Window Into Human Evolution
This article was originally published at The Conversation and has been republished under Creative Commons. Our species, Homo sapiens, rose in Africa some 300,000 years ago. The objects that…
Finding and Losing the World’s Oldest Art in Sulawesi
These handprints were made by blowing pigment around a hand placed against the wall in Sumpang Bita Cave, Sulawesi. Franco Viviani In 2019, I made a trip to…
The Fight to Secure Rights for Rainforests
The Sarayaku community hopes to convince Ecuador’s highest court that their territory is entitled to exist unmolested. Similar rights have been granted to the Ganges River and Te…
Dragan Djunda: Transition to nowhere: Small hydro, little electricity, and large profits in Serbia
When you enter the House of culture in Dojkinci, a small village on Stara Mountain, you are instantly amazed by its floor. The freshly painted red, green, and…
Felix Lussem: Alienating “facts” and uneven futures of energy transition
We are in the middle of the Rhineland’s lignite mining region, a semi-urban to rural area in the west of Germany. The landscape is considerably altered by past…
Animal Displacement from Syria: A Story Yet to be Written
During the Syrian war, which has now raged for a decade, the attention of scholars, media commentators and activists has primarily focused on human displacement. More than 60%…
Taboos around menstruation are leading to a growing environmental crisis in India
If the disposability of menstrual products is not prioritised as much as their accessibility, India could be dealing with mountains of discarded waste products in less than 50…
Arrival Waters
[no-caption] Traumlichtfabrik/Getty Images I am about 70 years away from the experience that led to this poem and about 50 years away from anthropology. Some 20 years ago…
What Problems Does Organic Cotton Solve?
[no-caption] Andrew Flachs One warm afternoon several years ago, I was walking with Korianna,* a farmer in Telangana, India, when I smelled something bad. The scent of diesel…
Heart of Stone
“The world is thus ‘animate.’ ‘We’ are not the only kind of we. The world is also ‘enchanted.’” —Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human Anthropologist…