Reimagining Ecological Repair

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

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 ...
Read More
Reimagining Ecological Repair

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 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 ...
Read More
Ecology and Democracy in a World on Fire

“The Amazon Is Not a Warehouse”

A conversation with Dionéia Ferreira on the Amazonian Transdisciplinary Network

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 ...
Read More
“The Amazon Is Not a Warehouse”

The Islandization of Miami

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

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 ...
Read More
The Islandization of Miami

Guantanamo, Again

No one is above the law, and no president should become a king

Tracking the damage President Trump has done in his first two months in office sometimes seems like counting the homes flattened in a hurricane. Every house matters to someone—but it’s the cumulative devastation that most matters to society as a whole. Yet as long as people are still picking through ...
Read More
Guantanamo, Again

From Moral Panic to Government Policy and Research

The stated rationale for policing street gangs in Montreal has always been “prevention” rather than actual incidents

The evolution of criminological research on gangs in Quebec mirrors events elsewhere. It began in the late 1980s with a media frenzy that attracted the attention of political elites and became the object of government policy and research....

Read More
From Moral Panic to Government Policy and Research

Rent Is the Crisis

Framing it as a “housing crisis” ignores that from the perspective of its winners, the system works just fine

Every first of the month, we hand over a share of our wages to meet our human need for housing. Our rents rise faster than our incomes, and inequality grows. Every first of the month, more tenants go without food, medication, and basic necessities to pay this tribute. More people ...
Read More
Rent Is the Crisis

Why Progressive “Myths” Distort Solutions to the Housing Shortage

A big deal that’s not nearly big enough: what the “city of yes” will (and won’t) do

In January 2025, Urban Matters, Center of New York City Affairs's weekly journal of ideas and opinion, wrapped up a wide-ranging two-part interview with noted urban policy expert Richard McGahey on the likely impact of New York City’s newly adopted "City of Yes" zoning package intended to jumpstart housing production. ...
Read More
Why Progressive “Myths” Distort Solutions to the Housing Shortage

Asylum and the Hierarchy of Suffering

Limitations of the US migration framework

Even before Trump barred asylum seekers from the US-Mexico border by declaring all unauthorized border crossings to be “invasions,” American asylum was a system with no winners. Now, while migrants at the border are stripped of the meager options they previously had recourse to, it’s crucial to understand what it meant, until very ...
Read More
Asylum and the Hierarchy of Suffering

In Search of the Sublime … Underground

How far can art carry us through New York City’s broken subway system?

Weekday mornings, as I walk to the 36th Street subway stop in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, I quicken my pace, anxious that if I miss the train, I’ll be late for work; worried that if it’s too crowded, I won’t get a seat on the 40-minute commute that lies ahead. As ...
Read More
In Search of the Sublime … Underground

Border Time

Policing movement in the Rio Grande Valley

The southern border of the United States has been policed intensively for over half a century. Donald Trump and many other global political leaders have narrowed their policy focuses from bordering more generally to building walls. Even short trips to the US-Mexico border make clear that the wall is not ...
Read More
Border Time