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…
Tag: environment
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…
Did a Magnetic Field Reversal Doom Neanderthals?
I remember exactly where I was when I first learned about magnetic field reversals: sitting in a lab as an undergraduate student in a geoarchaeology class. I knew…
Social Distancing in a Sumatra Rainforest
An Orang Rimba man named Nyeruduk stands in front of a tent on a rubber plantation in Sumatra. Dedi Supriansyah On an otherwise silent night in March 2020,…
The Fire This Time: Black and Indigenous Ecologies
In the past year, the world witnessed devastating fire seasons in Australia and the U.S. West, an Atlantic hurricane season with a record thirty storms, and a global…
Book forum: Julie Livington’s Self-Devouring Growth by Todd Meyers
This book forum brings together seven scholars to discuss Julie Livingston’s Self-Devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable as Told from Southern Africa (Duke 2019), a story of what grows alongside “…
On Wishcycling
Wishcycling is the process of placing discards into the recycling bin even when there’s little to no chance for their recovery. The term entered common use over the…
Must Conservation and Indigenous Rights Clash?
A group of Baiga tribespeople stand together. The Indian government has evicted thousands of Baiga people to make way for a wildlife reserve. Simon Williams/Ekta Parishad/Wikimedia Commons …
How to “Co-Live” With a Natural Hazard
Tungurahua, an active volcano in Ecuador, sits amid farming communities that have dwelled alongside it for generations. A.J. Faas As the Andes mountain range curves through Ecuador, it…
Firsting in Research
Declaring that a research is the “first” to discover, do, or go somewhere is not only rarely correct, given myriad local knowledges since time immemorial, but is also…
The Coastal Edge
New technologies are refortifying our coastlines against anthropogenic climate change, drawing our water edgelands near and making them tangible and perhaps valuable. Edgelands, those ignored yet sym…
Partnering with Nonhumans for Climate Action
Arctic sea ice is breaking up and melting as the world’s atmosphere and waters warm. Julianne Yip Arctic sea ice is dying: Its extent, volume, and thickness have…
Mobilizing Cemeteries, Representing Ancestors: The Infrastructure of Protest and the Anti-Petroleum Complex Movement in Pengerang, Malaysia
Resisting the “Rotterdam Port of the East” In 2011, the prime minister of Malaysia, Najib Razak, and the CEO of the national oil company Petronas, Shamsul Azhar Abbas,…