As the alarm bells have made it urgently clear—humanity has breached planetary boundaries—causing anthropogenic climate change and environmental disaster across the world.

People assume that adjusting to climate change means giving up stuff we want. But what if it means giving up things we’re well rid of?

People assume that adjusting to climate change means giving up stuff we want. But what if it means giving up things we’re well rid of?

Anthropologist Steven Gonzalez Monserrate draws on five years of research and ethnographic fieldwork in server farms to illustrate some of the diverse environmental impacts of data storage. The Cloud is not only material, but is also an ecological force.

Through her writings and the collaborative curatorial platform Feral Atlas, the anthropologist is offering new ways of imagining – and representing – our relationship to nature

Dr. Keith is a professor of applied physics and of public policy at Harvard, where he led the development of the university’s solar engineering research program.

It has been proposed that humans are now living within a period of the Earth’s history appropriately named ‘The Anthropocene’ (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000).

Human extinction. The coordinated release of various strains of a human sterilization virus.

Parag Khanna is the author of Connectography (2016) and The Future is Asian (2019). Michael Ferrari is managing partner at Atlas Research Innovations and a senior fellow at the Wharton School.

“If you look at Google Earth, it’s springtime everywhere,” explains Gopal Shah, Google Earth’s product manager, in a YouTube interview. In a TED talk he boasts that Google Earth is “cloud-free,” since the clouds and their shadows are edited out.

Humanity’s transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture is one of the most important developments in human and Earth history. Human societies, plant and animal populations, the makeup of the atmosphere, even the Earth’s surface – all were irreversibly transformed.

When René Descartes, sitting in his armchair in Leiden in 1641, invites his readers to meditate alongside him, you get the sense he could do with the company.

This is a piece about failures. My failures, mostly, as a thinker and a scholar, but also the failure of my field and the failure of all of us to think what will come in the next ten, twenty, thirty, hundred years.

On geological timescales, human civilization is an event, not an epoch. Humans are now living in a new geological epoch of our own making: the Anthropocene. Or so we’re told.

Tens of thousands of Londoners died of cholera from the 1830s to the 1860s. The causes were simple: mass quantities of human waste and industrial contaminants were pouring into the Thames, the central waterway of a city at the center of a rapidly industrializing world.

What does it mean to be alive right now? Right now. Right this second, right this epoch, as mankind alters the Earth beyond recognition.

Colonisation of the Americas at the end of the 15th Century killed so many people, it disturbed Earth's climate. That's the conclusion of scientists from University College London, UK.

Modern technology seems always to have been judged according to its utility for human beings. To the extent that technologies have been viewed as tools, instruments, or prostheses for human use, and thus under human control, they have largely been seen in positive, utopian terms.

Skip to main content Advertisement More Like This Advertisement More Like This More Interviews See All

RISING Dispatches from the New American Shore By Elizabeth Rush Illustrated. 299 pp. Milkweed Editions. $26. A drowned world: It’s an ancient fear and a very old story.