Tag: climate change
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Macroalgae Matters
Seaweed in a time of climate crisis: an encounter with a rotten seashore funk prompts writer Andrew Furman to discover more about sargassum.
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Compassionate Climate Activism
Vermont-based environmental and social justice advocate Chris Gaynor on the compulsion to protect, educate and care for our species.
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The Hockey Stick Poster Child
The Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow, and Landscape Research — Wald, Schnee und Landschaft (WSL) in German — sits on top of a hill in Birmensdorf, just outside Zurich. Tree-ring research first became part of WSL’s research mission in 1971, when Fritz Schweingruber started his work there. Fritz is a botanist, an archeologist, and…
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Revisiting a Geography of Hope
To be a farmer, at any point in history, means you grow food. You steward the land – soil, water, air, energy, plants, and animals – and make a living from its increase. It seems simple, at least in purpose, if not in practice: Grow good food. Now, in the twenty-first century, awareness is growing…
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Art in a deteriorating world
An epistolary exploration of art’s moral responsibilities “In the era of not yet, barely daring to guess of how soon,” wrote Welsh-British writer Horatio Clare about the melting sea ice, the planet’s air conditioner, in his book Icebreaker, published less then two years ago. Now the scientists dare to guess, and red lights on…
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The Gathering Cloud / An Ocean of Static
I write from Edinburgh, from a flat enveloped by the haar, a cold fog that comes in off the sea and whites out the world. The fog binds land with sea and sky. It feels like an apt place and time from which to respond, briefly, to two recent books by JR Carpenter – The…
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The CleanMeat Revolution
In The Box Gallery at the heart of We The Curious – Bristol’s centre for science and technology – is David Lisser’s exhibition, ‘The CleanMeat Revolution’. From the vantage point of a fictional future, the exhibition looks back at the period around 2030–2080. The show presents artefacts excavated from an imagined past, documentation of protests…
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Epicormic Psychology
The regeneration of Australia’s flora and fauna after fire is swift; or is this just a misconception of a nation’s psyche? The winding trail of sandstone rubble ascends before me through a pocket of dorsal-fin shaped bushland in Lapstone, in Australia’s Blue Mountains. This ecosystem is not granted a name. Even though it…
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Frankenstein: Before the Beginning
Every thing must have a beginning… and that beginning must be linked to something that went before. – Mary Shelley, Frankenstein. It was precisely two hundred years ago tonight that a very particular nightmare first appeared. In the early hours of 16 June 1816 – around 2:30am if a recent headline-grabbing astronomical…
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The Reality of Race
Over the last few decades there has been some confusion about the category of race, a category that was once so central to all the social sciences. If race often appears in quotes, does that mean it is not real? If race is a social construction, why is there still racism in institutions, feelings and…
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Ignaz Semmelweis and Anthropogenic Global Warming
Mortality rates in mothers from childbirth in Europe were shockingly high during the mid-19th century. Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian physician working in the General Hospital of Vienna, was curious as to why the medical students’ obstetrician clinic had a mortality rate over five times higher than the trainee midwives’ clinic within the same hospital. His…