Habitats Archives - Public Seminar

Beneath the Surface

An excerpt from The Problem with Plastic: How We Can Save Ourselves and Our Planet Before It’s Too Late

April 9, 2026 • by Judith Enck and Adam Mahoney

Beneath the tranquil surface of the water, a slow-moving crisis is unfolding—one that is quietly, yet relentlessly, reshaping life on Earth. Each year, millions of tons of plastic make their way into the oceans, hitching a ride from the land through streams and rivers. This plastic doesn’t disappear; instead, it ...

Climate & Ecology

Solar Express

In Here Comes the Sun, climate activist and author Bill McKibben experiments with the power of positive thinking

February 26, 2026 • by Shea Dean

What motivates people to work for social change—and work for it fast? In his most recent book, Here Comes the Sun (W. W. Norton & Company, 2025), the veteran climate reporter Bill McKibben tries to answer that question by presenting two truths. The first is that we are now in ...

Climate & Ecology

Love and Theft in a Drowning City

On Megha Majumdar’s A Guardian and a Thief

February 24, 2026 • by Katya Wack

A Guardian and a Thief (Knopf, 2025), the new novel by Megha Majumdar, unfolds over a single week in a not-so-distant future. Kolkata has been devastated by flooding and famine; Ma, a middle-class shelter manager, is preparing to flee the city with her father and two-year-old daughter to join her ...

Urban Environments

Class, Hegemony, and the Will to End a Neighborhood

An excerpt from The Tears of Other People: A history and memoir of displacement in Portsmouth, New Hampshire

February 12, 2026 • by E. M. Ippolito

Why is it important to interpret Portsmouth's history of urban renewal as a history of class? So far, historians who have published work on the subject have chosen not to take this angle. All contemporary writing on Puddle Dock and the North End—the city's two neighborhoods destroyed by urban renewal—notes ...

Class, Hegemony, and the Will to End a Neighborhood

Habitats

Some Notes on the Earth Seen From Space

We have turned the sky into a mirror of our persistence and our forgetting

February 4, 2026 • by Laurie Sheck

1. It has been almost 58 years since astronaut William Anders lifted his Hasselblad camera toward the window of Apollo 8 and captured the now-iconic image of Earth hovering beyond the gray, desolate edge of the moon, blue-white and small and fragile, hanging in the pure blackness of space. How beautiful ...

Education

The Words We Learn to Fear

How authoritarianism begins with the policing of language

December 4, 2025 • by Maria B. Olujic

The Polish poet Czesław Miłosz once wrote, “Language is the only homeland.” I didn’t understand that line until my own country broke apart. Now I see what he meant—when people learn to fear their own words, it is its own form of exile. Two of my uncles learned this early: ...

New York City

What Makes Cities Go BANANA?

On zoning, New York City’s housing crisis, and Abundance

November 4, 2025 • by Achilles Kallergis

The nearly hundred-year-old Holland Tunnel, the first mechanically ventilated underwater vehicular tunnel, opened in 1927 after just seven years of work. By contrast, the humble subway station elevators unveiled in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in 2020 took three years and approximately $80 million to realize. (The MTA, sensing commuter suspicion, even made ...

New York City

A Mayor Who Promises the Moon

Canvassing for Mamdani

October 29, 2025 • by Mitchell Abidor

In the run-up to this year’s election for New York City’s next mayor, I’ve spent several days canvassing for Zohran Mamdani. On every occasion I’ve been as much as a half-century older than the rest of my young, white comrades. Unlike most of them, I’m also a native New Yorker, ...

Climate & Ecology

Ecological Nightmare in Lahore, Pakistan

A city holding its breath

October 14, 2025 • by Uswa Shamail

Environmental crises are often narrated in statistics, satellite images, and policy briefings, but what they obscure are the intimate ways in which ecological collapse infiltrates daily life. In South Asia, climate change is not an abstract future—it is a suffocating present that shapes how parents care for their children, how ...

Ecological Nightmare in Lahore, Pakistan

Migration

Immigration Is Imperative

Without migrants, the US would be in dire economic straits

September 25, 2025 • by Purushottam Bhandare and Katerina Canyon

Donald Trump's accusation, in the 2024 presidential debate, that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were "eating pets" may have quickly proven false, but it still led to sweeping policy action. Soon after Trump was inaugurated, the administration abruptly terminated the Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan (CHNV) humanitarian parole programs, pulling the ...

History

Looking Back: The Indochina Migration and Refugee Act

The success of an immigration or refugee resettlement can never be fully evaluated in the first decades

September 16, 2025 • by Catherine Simpson Bueker

Catherine Simpson Bueker explores the legacy of the Indochina Migration and Refugee Act and how Vietnamese refugees in America reshaped US society....

Looking Back: The Indochina Migration and Refugee Act

Activism

On “Reconnecting with Nature” as a City-Dweller

An education in wheelbarrows, pin oaks, and herring gulls

September 10, 2025 • by Chrisaleen Ciro

A few weeks into my time here in NYC back in the fall of 2021, I volunteered at an urban farm in East Harlem. The crew of volunteers was diverse—some of us had experience growing food and others didn’t. At the time, I had worked on farms and market gardens ...