Environment & Climate

A film without a villain, unless the villain is eighty years of farming policy. Why the loss of birds and insects outside our own windows matters more than cute penguins, and what happens if struggling farmers go under.

Western thought ranks plants at the bottom of the living world, passive and without minds. A growing body of science says they sense, adapt, remember and communicate, and a pandemic year spent among them led to a film asking what follows if we take that seriously.

Oyster reefs are being restored as breakwaters and promoted as carbon sinks. Cores from 25 reefs in North Carolina show they grow with sea level, and that the shells they build give back the carbon they bury.

Antarctica is already committed to losing ice this century, even if warming is held to 1.5 °C. An AI trained on an archive of simulations tested hundreds of thousands of futures against satellite records, and the survivors point one way. How much ice is lost is still ours to decide.

In a case study comes in the book’s fifth chapter, I discuss how paleontological studies of extinction intersected with political debates about nuclear proliferation in the 1970s and 1980s.A variety...

I started Listed when I was working in Washington, DC, as a policy fellow with the American Association for the Advancement of Science. At the time the Endangered Species Act...

The Chemical Age is the story of intense famines, ceaseless wars, ravaging diseases, and ecological disasters, told through the personal lives of the scientists who strove to either halt calamity...

The book is full of stories connected with each of these segments of my life. I hope different browsers will first look at the table of contents, then open to...

Planetary Eating is a very rigorous examination of the mechanisms of human–planet interactions, agriculture and food production, and consumption set in motion. While other books address the environmental problems associated...

Sustainability is all the rage these days. It is espoused by government agencies from the local to the national, by international bodies, and by proliferating citizens’ groups and non-governmental organizations....

Waste occupies a paradoxical position today: it is made to be disposable, and we want to get rid of it, but we cannot. Where at other times in history, we’ve...

When the Endangered Species Act was passed, in 1973, traditional economics, which looked to self-interest and endless growth as the predominant drivers of the economy, was pretty much the only...

I’ve identified four reasons why our economic system doesn’t support the natural world. All four of these problems can be fixed by straightforward institutional or policy reforms. In fact, there are...

The Madhouse Effect is, by design, a book that readers can just pick up, skim through, and find a page that both engages and informs. If a reader were to...

In the beginning of the prologue I draw upon a specific recent event: the theft of thousands of scientists’ emails, including many of mine. This is the world in which...

I am not the first to suggest the end of nature. Close to two decades ago, Bill McKibben announced that climate change spells the empirical end of nature, and more...

When I first endeavored to write this book, I was thinking about what I would tell an elected official who asked what they needed to know about disasters. Or if...

The motivation for the book comes from the uncertain future that faces humanity. The twentieth century, as I wrote in my previous book, The Big Ratchet, was an extraordinary time...

The Fall of the Wild is a book about the ethical challenges of conservation in a time of accelerating wildlife losses and growing scientific and technological power. In an age...

When I commenced research for this book, I planned to focus predominantly on understandings of, and responses to, species endangerment and extinction. Yet archival materials and other primary sources revealed...

This book challenges some of the prevailing perspectives in the field of environmental history. First, there is a widely held view that concern about the protection of the natural environment...

One of the key objectives in Program Earth is to rework theories of sensing by decentering the human subject that is meant to be the key locus through which sensation...

I would hope readers open the book at the introduction where I describe the following:Imagine a sparkling day on Sydney’s Harbour... eating creamy Sydney rock oysters and drinking a glass...

The germ of this book sprouted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where I had returned in my mid-50s to start an academic career, after spending some 35 years working...

The Great Delusion is about the unrealistic expectations we all have about what this tired and picked-over planet can provide us. It is about economic growth, the belief that a...

When fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas are combusted they release CO2. This greenhouse gas is no ordinary pollutant but an inherent waste byproduct of the energy conversion. The CO2 is...

In some ways, a history of late twentieth-century utopianism fits neatly into histories of the twentieth century. Many scholars have emphasized that efforts to realize sweeping revisions to the structure...

Different Backgrounds, Joint TakeAs co-authors, each of us two has experience on the front lines of the battle to communicate the risks of climate change to the public. I am an...

Fifty years as photographer, chronicler and historian of expeditions for a Philadelphia natural history academy, in places that were beautiful, remote and reachable under conditions almost nobody will have again. Stand-alone essays from a career that was, by design, a throwback to an earlier era.

They both indicate that the current economic recovery from the global recession is inherently unsustainable. In 2008, the world was confronted with multiple crises—fuel, food and financial—and by December the result...

In this book, I examine the awkward position that scientists find themselves in when they enter environmental policy debates. In such debates experts try to square their appeal as objective,...

I went to graduate school in the 1980s, at the height of the Carter-Reagan Cold War. It was a very scary time, and not only because the risk of nuclear...

I discovered many interesting issues in my research into the illegal wildlife trade and will just mention three here. The German and British colonial governments in east Africa established the first game parks and game laws on the continent.

Measuring Tomorrow is essentially a guide to the well-being and sustainability transition and as such aims to make four contributions. First, while we have several insightful historical accounts of GDP’s...

The concept of the “self-conscious Anthropocene,” introduced in the book’s title, is one of the book’s innovations and points to its larger significance. The term Anthropocene was introduced in 2000...

I would like a “just browsing” reader to turn to one of the personal stories that open some of the chapters, such as my childhood fascination with nature shows and...

I hope that readers who are simply browsing the book will immediately recognize the difference between “philosophical warnings” and “trigger warnings.” While the latter aims to alert students and viewers...

The Invention of Ecocide traces the rise and fall of herbicidal warfare in Vietnam from the origins of plant physiology, in Charles Darwin’s laboratory, to the apex of the global...

My favorite chapter concerns the nature of international environmental norms. This may sound like an abstruse topic, but international environmental norms are closer to home than most people realize. In...

Towards the end of the book I put forward four myths about climate change. I would hope people may recognise the truths about our relationship with climate change that each...

My critics have “granted me” the point that developed free market cities have the ability and the capacity to cope with many aspects of climate change. But they have countered...

More offers a new narrative of the human story that highlights the importance of intentional reproduction—wanting a child, and then having one—in the evolution of civilization and in light of...

The reality is that sustainable (also called "socially responsible") investing mostly supports the status quo. Corporations are happy to receive sustainable investments, but they don’t let it change their course. They have one objective: produce value for shareholders.

Reptiles and amphibians are in trouble for a variety of reasons. Most are connected to habitat loss and degradation because of human activities. Many animals, including some reptiles, are eaten. They are items in the diet, especially in Asia.

The existence of a balance of nature has been a dominant part of Western philosophy since before Aristotle. But the science of ecology and evolutionary biology together demonstrate that there...

In much of the world, cities are expanding and growing to astronomical sizes. Along with the growth of cities comes the spread of suburbs. Suburban areas now dominate the perimeter...

All life forms are interconnected. We share our DNA with chimps (98%) but also with daffodils (35%). We drive cars that burn crushed dinosaurs. The oxygen we breathe is the...

A film without a villain, unless the villain is eighty years of farming policy. Why the loss of birds and insects outside our own windows matters more than cute penguins, and what happens if struggling farmers go under.

Western thought ranks plants at the bottom of the living world, passive and without minds. A growing body of science says they sense, adapt, remember and communicate, and a pandemic year spent among them led to a film asking what follows if we take that seriously.

Oyster reefs are being restored as breakwaters and promoted as carbon sinks. Cores from 25 reefs in North Carolina show they grow with sea level, and that the shells they build give back the carbon they bury.

Antarctica is already committed to losing ice this century, even if warming is held to 1.5 °C. An AI trained on an archive of simulations tested hundreds of thousands of futures against satellite records, and the survivors point one way. How much ice is lost is still ours to decide.

In a case study comes in the book’s fifth chapter, I discuss how paleontological studies of extinction intersected with political debates about nuclear proliferation in the 1970s and 1980s.A variety...

I started Listed when I was working in Washington, DC, as a policy fellow with the American Association for the Advancement of Science. At the time the Endangered Species Act...

The Chemical Age is the story of intense famines, ceaseless wars, ravaging diseases, and ecological disasters, told through the personal lives of the scientists who strove to either halt calamity...

The book is full of stories connected with each of these segments of my life. I hope different browsers will first look at the table of contents, then open to...

Planetary Eating is a very rigorous examination of the mechanisms of human–planet interactions, agriculture and food production, and consumption set in motion. While other books address the environmental problems associated...

Sustainability is all the rage these days. It is espoused by government agencies from the local to the national, by international bodies, and by proliferating citizens’ groups and non-governmental organizations....

Waste occupies a paradoxical position today: it is made to be disposable, and we want to get rid of it, but we cannot. Where at other times in history, we’ve...

When the Endangered Species Act was passed, in 1973, traditional economics, which looked to self-interest and endless growth as the predominant drivers of the economy, was pretty much the only...

I’ve identified four reasons why our economic system doesn’t support the natural world. All four of these problems can be fixed by straightforward institutional or policy reforms. In fact, there are...

The Madhouse Effect is, by design, a book that readers can just pick up, skim through, and find a page that both engages and informs. If a reader were to...

In the beginning of the prologue I draw upon a specific recent event: the theft of thousands of scientists’ emails, including many of mine. This is the world in which...

I am not the first to suggest the end of nature. Close to two decades ago, Bill McKibben announced that climate change spells the empirical end of nature, and more...

When I first endeavored to write this book, I was thinking about what I would tell an elected official who asked what they needed to know about disasters. Or if...

The motivation for the book comes from the uncertain future that faces humanity. The twentieth century, as I wrote in my previous book, The Big Ratchet, was an extraordinary time...

The Fall of the Wild is a book about the ethical challenges of conservation in a time of accelerating wildlife losses and growing scientific and technological power. In an age...

When I commenced research for this book, I planned to focus predominantly on understandings of, and responses to, species endangerment and extinction. Yet archival materials and other primary sources revealed...

This book challenges some of the prevailing perspectives in the field of environmental history. First, there is a widely held view that concern about the protection of the natural environment...

One of the key objectives in Program Earth is to rework theories of sensing by decentering the human subject that is meant to be the key locus through which sensation...

I would hope readers open the book at the introduction where I describe the following:Imagine a sparkling day on Sydney’s Harbour... eating creamy Sydney rock oysters and drinking a glass...

The germ of this book sprouted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where I had returned in my mid-50s to start an academic career, after spending some 35 years working...

The Great Delusion is about the unrealistic expectations we all have about what this tired and picked-over planet can provide us. It is about economic growth, the belief that a...

When fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas are combusted they release CO2. This greenhouse gas is no ordinary pollutant but an inherent waste byproduct of the energy conversion. The CO2 is...

In some ways, a history of late twentieth-century utopianism fits neatly into histories of the twentieth century. Many scholars have emphasized that efforts to realize sweeping revisions to the structure...

Different Backgrounds, Joint TakeAs co-authors, each of us two has experience on the front lines of the battle to communicate the risks of climate change to the public. I am an...

Fifty years as photographer, chronicler and historian of expeditions for a Philadelphia natural history academy, in places that were beautiful, remote and reachable under conditions almost nobody will have again. Stand-alone essays from a career that was, by design, a throwback to an earlier era.

They both indicate that the current economic recovery from the global recession is inherently unsustainable. In 2008, the world was confronted with multiple crises—fuel, food and financial—and by December the result...

In this book, I examine the awkward position that scientists find themselves in when they enter environmental policy debates. In such debates experts try to square their appeal as objective,...

I went to graduate school in the 1980s, at the height of the Carter-Reagan Cold War. It was a very scary time, and not only because the risk of nuclear...

I discovered many interesting issues in my research into the illegal wildlife trade and will just mention three here. The German and British colonial governments in east Africa established the first game parks and game laws on the continent.

Measuring Tomorrow is essentially a guide to the well-being and sustainability transition and as such aims to make four contributions. First, while we have several insightful historical accounts of GDP’s...

The concept of the “self-conscious Anthropocene,” introduced in the book’s title, is one of the book’s innovations and points to its larger significance. The term Anthropocene was introduced in 2000...

I would like a “just browsing” reader to turn to one of the personal stories that open some of the chapters, such as my childhood fascination with nature shows and...

I hope that readers who are simply browsing the book will immediately recognize the difference between “philosophical warnings” and “trigger warnings.” While the latter aims to alert students and viewers...

The Invention of Ecocide traces the rise and fall of herbicidal warfare in Vietnam from the origins of plant physiology, in Charles Darwin’s laboratory, to the apex of the global...

My favorite chapter concerns the nature of international environmental norms. This may sound like an abstruse topic, but international environmental norms are closer to home than most people realize. In...

Towards the end of the book I put forward four myths about climate change. I would hope people may recognise the truths about our relationship with climate change that each...

My critics have “granted me” the point that developed free market cities have the ability and the capacity to cope with many aspects of climate change. But they have countered...

More offers a new narrative of the human story that highlights the importance of intentional reproduction—wanting a child, and then having one—in the evolution of civilization and in light of...

The reality is that sustainable (also called "socially responsible") investing mostly supports the status quo. Corporations are happy to receive sustainable investments, but they don’t let it change their course. They have one objective: produce value for shareholders.

Reptiles and amphibians are in trouble for a variety of reasons. Most are connected to habitat loss and degradation because of human activities. Many animals, including some reptiles, are eaten. They are items in the diet, especially in Asia.

The existence of a balance of nature has been a dominant part of Western philosophy since before Aristotle. But the science of ecology and evolutionary biology together demonstrate that there...

In much of the world, cities are expanding and growing to astronomical sizes. Along with the growth of cities comes the spread of suburbs. Suburban areas now dominate the perimeter...

All life forms are interconnected. We share our DNA with chimps (98%) but also with daffodils (35%). We drive cars that burn crushed dinosaurs. The oxygen we breathe is the...