Society

The polycrisis

Is this the word we need to describe unprecedented convergences between ecological, political and economic strife?

Ville Lähde

Masts like a forest

How the trees of China – fir, camphor, ironwood and nanmu – were used to build an empire that lasted for centuries

Ian M Miller

Memories within myth

The stories of oral societies, passed from generation to generation, are more than they seem. They are scientific records

Patrick Nunn

Disturbance

How atomic doomsday experiments, fuelled by Cold War fears, shaped then shook ecologists’ faith in self-healing nature

Laura J Martin

Ever more land and labour

Centuries of capitalism saw the global countryside ruthlessly converted into cheap commodities. But at what cost?

Sven Beckert & Ulbe Bosma

Dancing with water

As storms, droughts and floods become more intense, what can the world learn from Japan’s profoundly wet history?

Giulio Boccaletti

The power of shit

Our excrement is a natural, renewable and sustainable resource – if only we can overcome our visceral disgust of it

Lina Zeldovich

Contaminated kinship

If your hometown were beset with toxic dust, like Australia’s Broken Hill, would you feel any less connected to it?

Lilian Pearce

The miracle of the commons

Far from being profoundly destructive, we humans have deep capacities for sharing resources with generosity and foresight

Michelle Nijhuis

Human crap

We are demigods of discards – but our copious garbage became a toxic burden only with the modern cult of ‘disposability’

Gabrielle Hecht

Slow hope

Climate change is an emergency but despair is not the answer. The world is full of untold stories of people-powered change

Christof Mauch

Little Ice Age lessons

The world’s last climate crisis demonstrates that surviving is possible if bold economic and social change is embraced

Dagomar Degroot

Turn and live with animals

The slaughterhouse ethic of Soviet and American whalers tells us we must look beyond communism and capitalism to survive

Bathsheba Demuth

Did European colonisation precipitate the Little Ice Age?

Dagomar Degroot

It’s wrongheaded to protect nature with human-style rights

Anna Grear

When the monsoon goes away

The imperious monsoon rains have ruled India for centuries. Already unstable, what happens if they shift fundamentally?

Sunil Amrith