Browse Topics
Pollution
The Four Invasions
Nick Estes On Indigenous Resistance And The Vision Of A Better Future
Indigenous people are protecting the earth’s lungs and liver. Without us, civilization would be even farther down the road to its own destruction.
May 2020
Green Freak
He has developed a shorthand response to my entreaties: Landfill, he hisses, and he walks away.
October 2019
Before It’s Too Late
Mary Christina Wood On Avoiding Climate Disaster
Our choice is clear: ignore the crisis and be swept up in a cycle of accelerating disaster, or manage a rapid decline of fossil-fuel use to avert the worst.
February 2019
Sunken Treasures
Sylvia Earle On Why We Need To Protect The Oceans
We have measured a sharp decrease in oxygen in the ocean over the last fifty years. If the ocean has less oxygen, then less is going into the atmosphere as well. I don’t want to mess around with my oxygen-generating system. Ask any astronaut how important your oxygen-generating system is. Shouldn’t this be the highest priority of every man, woman, and child — to be able to breathe?
July 2018
Sunbeams
April 2018It is blasphemy to separate oneself from the earth and look down on it like a god. It is more than blasphemy; it is dangerous. We can never be gods, after all — but we can become something less than human with frightening ease.
excerpted from
The Round Walls Of Home
We need to send into space a flurry of artists and naturalists, photographers and painters, who will turn the mirror upon ourselves and show us Earth as a single planet, a single organism that’s buoyant, fragile, blooming, buzzing, full of spectacles, full of fascinating human beings, something to cherish. Learning our full address may not end all wars, but it will enrich our sense of wonder and pride.
June 2016
The Skeleton Gets Up And Walks
Craig Childs On How The World Is Always Ending
We think of apocalypse as a moment — a flash of light, then you’re gone — but if we study the earth’s history, we find that it’s not one moment. It’s actually a long process. In fact, it’s hard to see where it begins or ends. Like right now: evidence indicates that we’re experiencing the planet’s sixth mass extinction — a period when the rate of extinction spikes and the diversity and abundance of life decrease. Each such extinction event takes hundreds of thousands of years to play out, and it’s generally 5 to 8 million years before the previous levels of biodiversity return. So are we at the end or the beginning of a cycle? This could just be a temporary spike. The pattern could swerve in a different direction.
June 2016
Weekly Apocalyptic, Or Poem Written On The Wall In An Ascending Space Capsule
We had to stop what we were doing / to see what we had done. Thing was, / we wouldn’t.
December 2012In Their Backyard
Robert D. Bullard On The Politics Of Where We Put Our Trash
We need a system to determine when a community has already shouldered its fair share. Right now, if someone wants to build a hazardous-waste facility, the EPA or state will assess the risk to nearby residents from that new facility only; the risks posed by the three or four or five polluters already in the area aren’t added to the equation. So there is nothing that might trigger the EPA or state to say that this community is overburdened by pollution.
May 2012
Waste
As a country person, I often feel that I am on the bottom end of the waste problem. I live on the Kentucky River about ten miles from its entrance into the Ohio. The Kentucky, in many ways a lovely river, receives an abundance of pollution from the eastern Kentucky coal mines and the central Kentucky cities.
May 2012
