Climate & Ecology Archives - Page 2 of 3

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

Ethologies of Animal Politics

Do animals have political cultures?

January 29, 2024 • by Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka

Consider the growing ethological evidence of how animal communities themselves do face-to-face politics....

Climate & Ecology

A Botany of Decolonization

An excerpt from Maria Thereza Alves: Seeds of Change

February 13, 2023 • by J. Kēhaulani Kauanui

Colonization is built into the very soil of New York....

Climate & Ecology

A Globe, Clothing Itself with Ears

Stories of speaking with animals are as old as human history

November 3, 2022 • by Karen Bakker

Human ambivalence about animal language persists and is linked with our uncertainty about human status: Are we one animal among others, or does something truly set us apart? Debates over animal language are a touchstone for human uncertainties about our role in the cosmos....

Climate & Ecology

Why We Need to Care About Animal Ethics in a Time When Humans Suffer Too

Alice Crary and Lori Gruen share their “critical animal theory” in a conversation with Public Seminar

September 14, 2022 • by Claire Potter, Lori Gruen and Alice Crary

The division between “humans” and “animals” is not a natural division, but a conceptual one that privileges humans over animals, and not even all humans. This divide operates in a way that justifies the oppression of animals and humans thought to be “closer” to animals, which has often meant women, ...

Why We Need to Care About Animal Ethics in a Time When Humans Suffer Too

Climate & Ecology

Crisis / Orangutans

A case study excerpted from Animal Crisis

September 14, 2022 • by Lori Gruen and Alice Crary

From 2000 to 2015, 150,000 orangutans on Borneo died as their forest homes were destroyed and they became exposed to humans. And orangutans aren’t the only creatures to suffer from this massive destruction....

Climate & Ecology

Fuel for Thought: Climate Change as Class War

The climate crisis has its material foundations in the capitalist system of production; Syracuse University geographer Matthew Huber proposes that tackling the problem requires changing how production is organized

June 7, 2022 • by Vince Carducci

Huber is essentially correct that the climate crisis is for all intents and purposes a class war, that of the transnational national capitalist class against the rest of us...

Fuel for Thought: Climate Change as Class War

Climate & Ecology

Eco-anxiety Is a Threat to Global Mental Health—and to the Planet

If we are so overwhelmed that we turn away from climate change, it will defeat us

June 2, 2022 • by Lindsay Myers

I see the climate clock on Union Square almost every day: on my way to the grocery store, when I stop by the farmer’s market, and even on my morning quest for caffeine before I am ready to face the day much less impending climate catastrophe. In bright orange neon ...

Eco-anxiety Is a Threat to Global Mental Health—and to the Planet

Climate & Ecology

A Near-Future Novel for Our Gorgeous and Beleaguered Present

Alexandra Kleeman chats with Helen Schulman about her new book, Something New Under the Sun

September 10, 2021 • by Alexandra Kleeman and Helen Schulman

_____ Upon the publication of her new novel, Something New Under the Sun (Hogarth, 2021), New School faculty Alexandra Kleeman sat down with Helen Schulman, faculty and fiction chair at the Creative Writing program, to talk about Los Angeles, the climate crisis, and writing about the very near future. The interview was presented by the Creative Writing ...

A Near-Future Novel for Our Gorgeous and Beleaguered Present

Climate & Ecology

A Patch of Moonlight

Darwin’s warning

August 25, 2021 • by Ruth Padel

_____ Rustles of the night in the Nilgiri Hills. I sit behind the low wall of a veranda beside Priya who invited me here, her husband Jean Philippe, and her brother Peter. They are scientists and naturalists. This is what they do every night. I am very lucky to be their ...

Climate & Ecology

Chimpanzee Culture Wars

Cultural primatology in the Anthropocene

October 20, 2020 • by Nicolas Langlitz

Photo Credit: Observing chimpanzee cultures in the wild, Bossou, Guinea / Nicolas Langlitz ————— As the culture wars became more heated in the 1980s, significant parts of American cultural anthropology broke ties with evolutionary anthropology. Supposedly, the evolutionists’ Panglossian perspective regarded human life as perfectly adapted and thereby naturalized the status quo ...

Climate & Ecology

Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta

A webinar view, featuring author Debjani Bhattacharyya and commenter Kasia Paprocki

July 15, 2020 • by Claire Potter

The event was hosted and moderated by Claire Potter, co-executive editor at Public Seminar & professor of history at The New School for Social Research. Save the date: our next Public Seminar book talk is on Wednesday, July 22, featuring Ted Widmer, author of Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to ...