A man burns old palm fruit from a palm oil plantation in Cameroon. Photo: Go Forth FilmsThe big stories of 2017 clustered into five categories: Donald Trump and the capture of the U.S. government by fossil fuel interests; The destruction of Puerto Rico and its subsequent abandonment by the U.S. government [UPDATE: not quite abandoned […]
31 December 2017 (Desdemona Despair) – This photo, by Hal Bernton of The Seattle Times, captures the zeitgeist of 2017: humans blithely golfing while their immediate environment burns. Behind the golfers, the Eagle Creek Fire rages on both sides of the Columbia River Gorge, in Washington and Oregon, on 4 September 2017.You might think this […]
23 December 2017 (Desdemona Despair) – In 1992, the Union of Concerned Scientists issued a dire “warning to humanity”: Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage on the environment and on critical resources. If not checked, many of our current practices put at […]
By Gary Numan 4 September 17 (The Daily Beast) – Usually when I write songs, I use whatever recent turmoil there has been in my life as the source of inspiration. I’m the first to admit I have no talent for happy or uplifting songs, but I can turn out tunes to darker things with […]
By David Wallace-Wells14 July 2017(New York Magazine) – We published “The Uninhabitable Earth” on Sunday night, and the response since has been extraordinary — both in volume (it is already the most-read article in New York Magazine’s history) and in kind. Within hours, the article spawned a fleet of commentary across newspapers, magazines, blogs, and […]
By Malia Wollan 18 July 2017 (The New York Times) — It was a freakishly warm evening last October when a maintenance worker first discovered the water — torrents of it, rushing into the entrance tunnel of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a storage facility dug some 400 feet into the side of a mountain […]
By Pallab Ghosh 2 July 2017 (BBC News) – Stephen Hawking says that US President Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement could lead to irreversible climate change. Prof Hawking said the action could put Earth onto a path that turns it into a hothouse planet like Venus.He also feared aggression […]
15 June 2017 (The Guardian) – A few years ago, Björk began corresponding with a philosopher whose books she admired. “hi timothy,” her first message to him began. “i wanted to write this letter for a long time.” She was trying to give a name to her own singular genre, to label her work for […]
By Damian Carrington19 May 2017 (The Guardian) – It was designed as an impregnable deep-freeze to protect the world’s most precious seeds from any global disaster and ensure humanity’s food supply forever. But the Global Seed Vault, buried in a mountain deep inside the Arctic circle, has been breached after global warming produced extraordinary temperatures […]
By Clive Hamilton4 May 2017 (The Guardian) – After 200,000 years of modern humans on a 4.5 billion-year-old Earth, we have arrived at new point in history: the Anthropocene. The change has come upon us with disorienting speed. It is the kind of shift that typically takes two or three or four generations to sink […]
