The forests near Fukushima and Chernobyl likely have been changed forever.
Winifred BirdJane Braxton Little
Return of the Wild
Will humans make way for the greatest conservation experiment in centuries?
Adam Federman
Reports
Extremely Loud
We have drowned out the natural soundscape
Maureen Nandini Mitra
And Incredibly Bright
We have blotted out the night sky
Holly Haworth
A Hitchhiker's Guide to Planet Earth
Where humans go, so go our dependents and hangers-on.
Nate Seltenrich
City Life
Our urban environs have become ecosystems all their own
Juliet Kemp
Running Dry
We are sucking the world’s ancient freshwater stores faster than they can be replenished
Jessica C. Kraft
Chemically Altered
Synthetic chemicals permeate the environment to such an extent that they have changed the chemistry of our planet.
Elizabeth Grossman
Reflections
Welcome to the Anthropocene
As in all things, the bacteria got there first.
David Biello
Anthropocene is the Wrong Word
Has the human impact on Earth “cut to the very bone” of deep time, as some have claimed, effectively ending the Holocene Epoch and ushering in what should be called the Anthropocene?
Yes – an...
Kathleen Dean Moore
Misanthropocene?
My first earthquake happened at four in the morning, when some small god picked up my apartment building and shook it lightly before setting it down like a Christmas box that would, soon enough, be to...
Raj Patel
Living Through the Anthropocene Storm
“It’s too late, isn’t it?”
That was the subject line of an email I received the other day. The sender was a mother in Brooklyn who, in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, was terrified of what cli...
Mark Hertsgaard
Beware the Rainmakers
In 1838, James Pollard Espy, the first meteorologist to be employed by the US government, made an odd request to the Senate: He proposed they pay him for burning huge swaths of the nation’s forests....
Ginger Strand
Will Branding Help?
For Paul Crutzen, the Nobel laureate who has contributed enormously to our understanding of our beleaguered planet, the idea of the Anthropocene might be a way for us to recommit to safeguarding the p...
Gus Speth
Age of the Sociopath
The term Anthropocene not only doesn’t help us stop this culture from killing the planet – it contributes directly to the problems it purports to address.
First, it’s grossly misleading. Huma...
Derrick Jensen
Anthropocenic Creation Tale
There’s a discussion that my wife, Beckie Kravetz, and I have periodically about the nature of our respective lines of work. Beckie is a figurative sculptor: She renders the human form in bronze and...
Alan Weisman
Earth Island Reports
Food Shift
Making Food Recovery a Valued Service
Dana Frasz
Best Ethical Destinations for 2013
Ethical Traveler
Jeff Greenwald, Christy Hoover And Natalie Lefevre
1000 Words
A One-Trick Shiva
Photographer J. Henry Fair
Journal Staff
Conversation
Alex Steffen
On the list of best job titles ever – explorer, inventor, superstar architect – “planetary futurist” must surely be near the top of the pile. Writer Alex Steffen has earned that enviable monik...
Jason Mark
In Review
End Times
Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth By Sasha Lilley, David McNally, Eddie Yuen, James Davis, with a foreword by Doug Henwood PM Press, 2012, 192 pages
Tom Athanasiou
Wild Kingdom USA
Nature Wars: The Incredible Story of How Wildlife Comebacks Turned Backyards into Battlegrounds By Jim Sterba Random House, 2012, 336 pages
Jason Mark
Voices
Eco-Politics 2.0
On one level, the green movement won the game a long time ago: It convinced the majority of Americans that ecosystem destruction is a serious problem. Today 73 percent of Americans say they are worrie...
Nathanael Johnson
+/-
Hack the Sky?
Since the scale of the climate change crisis became clear, our response has focused on trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to maintain the climate at something like the pre-industrial status quo...
Journal Staff
We need some Symptomatic Relief
Ken Caldeira is an atmospheric scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University.
When thinking about the ethics of solar geoengineering, I ...
Ken Caldeira
The New Sorcerer’s Apprentices
Clive Hamilton is Professor of Public Ethics at Charles Sturt University in Canberra, Australia. He is the author of Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change. His new book, ...
Clive Hamilton
Talking Points
Weather Forecast: A Cloudy Future for Nukes
In the 1950s, when the first nuclear reactors were conceived, there were few computers. Engineers created blueprints using lead pencils and slide rules. Back then the atmosphere’s carbon content was...
Gar Smith
Local News from All Over: Spring 2013
Africa Eyes in the SkyDrone warfare is coming to the African savannah.
The aerial surveillance technology – pioneered by the US military to locate and then bomb suspected terrorists – is poise...
Journal Staff
Notes from a Warming World: Spring 2013
New Hot ColorsIn January the mercury soared so high Down Under that Australia’s meteorology department added two new colors to its weather map – incandescent purple and pink. Red simply wasn’t h...
