Climate & Ecology Archives

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 ...

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

Climate & Ecology

Reimagining Ecological Repair

A review of Laura J. Martin’s Wild by Design

May 26, 2025 • by Mairéad O’Donnell

The Disney Wilderness Preserve in Florida began as a corporate-led initiative to counteract wetland destruction caused by Disney’s expansion in the Orlando area. Launched in the early 1990s, the project aimed to restore nearly 12,000 acres of wetlands and uplands degraded by decades of cattle ranching, fire suppression, and hydrological ...

Capitalism

Ecology and Democracy in a World on Fire

Our first responsibility, always, is to preserve the world, and our second is to improve it

May 21, 2025 • by Jedediah Britton-Purdy

The following text was first presented on April 22, 2025, as a distinguished lecture presented by the Henry H. Arnhold Forum on Global Challenges and the New School for Social Research. I want to trace the outline of an era that has closed. It ran from roughly the end of the ...

Ecology and Democracy in a World on Fire

Activism

“The Amazon Is Not a Warehouse”

A conversation with Dionéia Ferreira on the Amazonian Transdisciplinary Network

May 8, 2025 • by Dionéia Ferreira, Eduardo Staszowski and Renata Zampronio

Dionéia Ferreira is a scholar, environmental activist, and community leader in southern Amazonas, Brazil, where she plays a key role in weaving together RETA, the Amazonian Transdisciplinary Network. RETA connects local communities, women leaders, researchers, and legal actors across the territory surrounding the BR-319 highway—a controversial infrastructure project at the ...

Climate & Ecology

The Islandization of Miami

Stephanie Wakefield’s new book explores what “urban resilience” programs get wrong about our future

April 22, 2025 • by Lily Chishan Wong

Do cities have a place in our future? Geographers such as Stephanie Wakefield have identified urbanization as both driver and product of the Anthropocene, the “geological time impacted by human activities.” The uneven capitalist productions of urban spaces, along with operational landscapes required to sustain urban life—such as global supply ...

Climate & Ecology

Petro-Capitalist Status Quo

In Overshoot, Andreas Malm and Wim Carton show how governments have failed to stop the fossil fuel industry bulldozing through international emissions thresholds

November 12, 2024 • by Martin Weiner

Andres Malm and Wim Carton’s new book, Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown (Verso, 2024), is a thorough and unsparing account of the recent history and politics of the attempt to mitigate fossil fuels, and the reasons for its significant failure. Both authors teach at Lund University in Sweden. ...

Climate & Ecology

How Can Cities Drive Net-Zero Carbon Goals and Create Vibrant Urban Communities?

Nature-based solutions offer a way forward

March 13, 2024 • by Karen C. Seto

Cities must achieve four goals: minimize greenhouse gas emissions, foster low and net-zero carbon behaviors, minimize changes in land cover that increase local temperatures and exacerbate the urban heat island effect, and create livable and vibrant communities. ...

How Can Cities Drive Net-Zero Carbon Goals and Create Vibrant Urban Communities?

Climate & Ecology

Animal Sovereignties and the Wolves of Isle Royale

An excerpt from Interspecies Politics

March 12, 2024 • by Rafi Youatt

The biggest challenge posed by the question of wild animal sovereignties is to the operation of human sovereignty, which itself is figured through animality and in some cases through animals....

Animal Sovereignties and the Wolves of Isle Royale

Climate & Ecology

Taking Water for Granted

Modern infrastructure has created the expectation of a continuous, drinkable flow of water

March 5, 2024 • by Oana Filip and Liviu Chelcea

Water use has always been an indicator of social relations. In western societies, most treat drinking water as a simultaneously infinite and hyper-individualized resource. But plastic pollution and the climate emergency are forcing us to question our consumption habits....

Climate & Ecology

Beneath the Surface

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

Solar Express

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

Love and Theft in a Drowning City

On Megha Majumdar’s A Guardian and a Thief

Ecological Nightmare in Lahore, Pakistan

A city holding its breath

Reimagining Ecological Repair

A review of Laura J. Martin’s Wild by Design

Ecology and Democracy in a World on Fire

Our first responsibility, always, is to preserve the world, and our second is to improve it

“The Amazon Is Not a Warehouse”

A conversation with Dionéia Ferreira on the Amazonian Transdisciplinary Network

The Islandization of Miami

Stephanie Wakefield’s new book explores what “urban resilience” programs get wrong about our future

Petro-Capitalist Status Quo

In Overshoot, Andreas Malm and Wim Carton show how governments have failed to stop the fossil fuel industry bulldozing through international emissions thresholds

How Can Cities Drive Net-Zero Carbon Goals and Create Vibrant Urban Communities?

Nature-based solutions offer a way forward

Animal Sovereignties and the Wolves of Isle Royale

An excerpt from Interspecies Politics

Taking Water for Granted

Modern infrastructure has created the expectation of a continuous, drinkable flow of water

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