I’m a student of environmental history. I’ve also long been interested in how humanity, society, and the environment have coevolved. Let’s take the example of fire as one of the major agents of change. As William Cronon writes in his introduction to Steve Pyne’s Fire: A brief history: The process of fire’s coevolution with humanity…Continue Reading…
There are two stories in the current issue of New York Magazine that are of great interest to me, particularly this one by Robert Sullivan, titled, “The Concrete Jungle.” I’m teaching an Advanced Reporting course this Fall at New York University, called Hidden New York: Where the Wild Things Are, and incredibly, Sullivan’s wide-ranging survey…Continue Reading…
In the current issue of American Scientist, environmental historian John McNeill mines a famous political treatise to posit why climate change is an intractable socio-political issue: We know orders of magnitude more about the global climate system and climate history than we did in 1950. We do know that there are potential alternative states and…Continue Reading…
Humans have taken over the earth. Evidently there’s a new concept that confirms this, called anthropogenic biomes. Then there’s the recent push by scientists to declare a new era, called the anthropocene. I jest, only because this is not new territory. Environmental historians have built a whole discipline from this fertile ground. And geographers dug…Continue Reading…
This brilliant post by environmental historian Steve Pyne might be the first time that anyone has compared wildfire to Wall Street: Like economic transactions, fire is not a substance but a reaction ““ an exchange. It takes its character from its context. It synthesizes its surroundings. Its power derives from the power to propagate. To…Continue Reading…