The report includes chapters for each continent, habitat type, and social system, analyzing the impacts on each in depth, ending with a chapter on sustainable development.

At all those locations stood former temples/shrines that gods and ghosts used to occupy but were demolished to make way for urban infrastructure. Despite repeated banning and purging of deities and temples, worshippers burn incense and paper money, make offerings, and become possessed in those places. The gods’ agency seems to be exercised even after their temples and bodies are destroyed.

An increase in the concentration of particulate matter (PM10) by 10 μg/m³ reduces the vote share of incumbent parties by two percentage points

18% of samples exceeded relevant health guidelines or regulatory limits. Metal foodware (51%), ceramics (45%), paint (41%), toys (13%), and cosmetics (12%) were the most common culprits.

While the developed world has (mostly!) eliminated lead from consumer goods, lower-income countries are still producing contaminated items.

frozen by design
our calling becomes all calling.

As farmers pump out water to irrigate crops, ground water levels drop and massive sinkholes can form…

going back in time and trying to find the origin of some of the foundational institutions of society, from democracy to the legal system, and at the heart of the origin of those institutions, I always found water.

Who decides where a river starts? …

… the massive increase in demand for cheap, subsidized autonomous vehicle rides will result in an increase in the number of cars in our cities. AV companies will then lobby for some roads to be designated as ‘autonomous only.’ This will be pitched as a way to increase safety and efficiency but the ultimate goal will be to eliminate public transit and human driving in order to force people to sign up to an AV subscription.

The distopia self-driving car companies are trying to build and what we could do to design our cities for people instead.

I am sorry that there is more
& more of you lately I do not understand.
Sometimes I want simply to sit alone a long time
in silence. America, you must want this too.

I interpret the fin de Siècle through concepts and experiences of time and space that were reinterpreted in high culture, reworked by new communication and transportation technologies, and palpably manifest in everyday life.

Anchored in sociological and political theory, this comprehensive volume provides hard data and empirical research that traces the power and influence of the fossil fuel industry through economics, politics, media, and higher education. Contributors demonstrate how corporations secure popular consent, and coopt, disorganize, or marginalize dissenting perspectives to position the fossil fuel industry as a national public good.

After intensive logging in the 17th century nearly wiped out Akita Prefecture’s native forests, the government undertook various programs in the 18th and 19th centuries to encourage trees be replanted and preserved for us future generations.

Without vultures to consume them, there were more dead animals lying around, which sometimes ended up in rivers or other bodies of water, tainting local water supplies.

What humans get out of biodiversity.

Inventions do not simply emerge in a particular setting and spread gradually and uniformly across the globe. The common notion of one-way “technology transfer” only rarely describes accurately the relation between various nations or continents. Whereas people in one region may adopt innovations willingly, inhabitants in other regions may reject them outright. History teaches us that technologies can be later discarded. As I will show in several chapters, new technological solutions and long-established technologies are often employed in synergy.

A “snapshot” history of modern technology from the perspective of everyday people in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Eight thousand years of human civilization and here we are: still trying to bring the rain back with an animal sacrifice.

On the fake, and real, causes of California’s water crisis.

Farming uses 50 percent of [Earth’s habitable land] and what you find is that around 75 percent of our agricultural land is grazing land. […] We are using a huge portion of usable human land to raise cows.

A realistic picture of what building a “green economy” would require.

It was the kind of science I’d moved to Atlanta to learn to do…

Childhood lead exposure has devastating lifelong consequences, as even low-level exposure stunts intelligence and leads to delinquent behavior. However, these consequences may be more extensive than previously thought because childhood lead exposure may adversely affect normal-range personality traits.

In a preregistered investigation, we tested this hypothesis by linking historic atmospheric lead data from 269 US counties and 37 European nations to personality questionnaire data from over 1.5 million people who grew up in these areas. Adjusting for age and socioeconomic status, US adults who grew up in counties with higher atmospheric lead levels had less adaptive personality profiles: they were less agreeable and conscientious and, among younger participants, more neurotic.

Next, we utilized a natural experiment, the removal of leaded gasoline because of the 1970 Clean Air Act, to test whether lead exposure caused these personality differences. Participants born after atmospheric lead levels began to decline in their county had more mature, psychologically healthy adult personalities (higher agreeableness and conscientiousness and lower neuroticism), but these findings were not discriminable from pure cohort effects.

Our findings suggest that further reduction of lead exposure is a critical public health issue.

a viewpoint or factoid that is often accepted as true but which is actually false. They generally arise from conventional wisdom, stereotypes, superstitions, fallacies, a misunderstanding of science, or the popularization of pseudoscience.

Surviving a famine nearly doubles the risk of diabetes in the next generation.

The mountain is in fact an industrial park in Hsinchu, a coastal city southwest of Taipei. Its shrine bears an unassuming name: the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.

A journalist gets an inside look at the people, machines, and ideology behind the world’s most advanced computer chip manufacturer.

Our daily lives in the vast universe are integrally related to and can never be separated from time and space. How successful a person is and how effective one handles one’s affairs depend on one’s management of interpersonal relationships, one’s utilization of time, and one’s allocation of space.

Through numerous, and some humorous, stories, Master Hsing Yun explains time and space from a Buddhist perspective and how practitioners must transcend their limitations in order to “seize eternity within an instant and to see the wondrous reality in each flower, each tree, each body of water, and each rock.”

Curled thrush song staggering over moral tally
Number is all wrote Baudelaire
Fox kits hunting solitary voles
So many beings here without despair

… the “Axial Age” presents a puzzle: why did this emerge at the same time as distinct moralizing religions, with highly similar features in different civilizations? The puzzle may be solved by quantitative historical evidence that demonstrates an exceptional uptake in energy capture (general prosperity) just before the Axial Age in these three regions.

Statistical modeling confirms that economic development, not political complexity or population size, accounts for the timing of the Axial Age.

All species have an environmental niche, and despite technological advances, humans are unlikely to be an exception. Here, we demonstrate that for millennia, human populations have resided in the same narrow part of the climatic envelope available on the globe, characterized by a major mode around 11°C–15°C mean annual temperature (MAT).

… in the absence of migration, [by 2070] one third of the global population is projected to experience a MAT >29°C currently found in only 0.8% of the Earth’s land surface, mostly concentrated in the Sahara.

See how troubled are those with attachments…

Mendicants, all the hard work that gets done depends on the earth…

Rather than “primitive” hill tribes being attracted to the glamour and stability of valley settlements, hill cultures are formed by people running away from civilization.

We soak rice until
the water clouds. On the television, a fiesta…

you spoke of dancing. And the Baltic
Sea you placed in tiny glasses
what you knew of Kosovo
and how our students marched…

I was the angry one, and I was the sad one,
and I am the head shaking in wonder

How “Buddhist” do you think this poem is? Can it be interpreted in multiple ways? How does it make you feel about the world?

The future holds daunting challenges for human society and our environment. Populations are expanding, demand for resources is increasing, the climate is changing, and humanity’s impacts on the planet continue to mount. Will we be able to achieve a better quality of life for our growing population without compromising the ability of future generations to achieve the same?

By refocusing and redoubling its efforts to advance practical, impactful solutions for humanity’s multifaceted, vexing problems, the field of environmental engineering can build on its past successes—and chart new territory—in the decades ahead.

Let us now consider whether or not we, you and I, have prima facie obligations towards ecosystems, in particular, the obligation to avoid destroying them, apart from any human advantage that might be gained by their continued existence.

Fish and their feces play a hugely important and vastly underrated role in ocean chemistry and the carbon cycle that shapes Earth’s climate

What if short swords, enchanted tree trunks, and hefted boulders were allowed a voice? Shouldn’t an Althing include all things? Isn’t a republic a res publica, a public thing? At a parliament, what gets to speak?

There was over a mile of vertical ropes to climb above him. Taking a heavy pack might slow him down. It might cost lives. He did, however, take his camera’s flash cards, as they contained the only photographs ever captured of Veryovkina’s terminus.

A National Geographic photographer recounts his fight to escape the world’s deepest cave.

… back in the 1800s, Ellis Chesbrough was the man. And no one has ever worked harder to save Chicago from its own poop.

Hanko, sometimes called insho, are the carved stamp seals that people in Japan often use in place of signatures.

Hanko seals are made from materials ranging from plastic to jade and are about the size of a tube of lipstick. The end of each hanko is etched with its owner’s name, usually in the kanji pictorial characters used in Japanese writing. This carved end is then dipped in red cinnabar paste and impressed on a document as a form of identification.

We’re not going to get away with this forever. I mean there’s a price to be paid for this kind of materialism

About 100 vehicles were taken to the Bethel landfill last year. Meanwhile, about 300 vehicles were barged into town.

You Licchavis are so fixated on sensual pleasures!

For the conclusion, see AN 5.195.

Many people have this paradigm of seeing it all as natural, but…

We have a billion years to fine tune our plans without missing too much of the universe.

Everything with edges, a shape, parts, or an internal structure is the result of energy flowing through matter within certain boundaries and is only maintained so long as that energy keeps flowing and the boundaries don’t change.

… though money is an idea, basically, it represents stuff, and stuff is made of carbon

An interview with the woman spearheading the new discipline explaining how human social structures impact the environment.

At approximately nine o’clock at night on January 26, 1700 A.D., a magnitude-9.0 earthquake struck the Pacific Northwest, causing sudden land subsidence, drowning coastal forests, and, out in the ocean, lifting up a wave half the length of a continent.

An earthquake will destroy a sizable portion of the coastal Northwest. The question is when.

They are not new, these most ancient of divinities.
Our clamor woke them from the subdivided soil.
They rise to rule us

Never was a scene more desolate. The trees in these regions were incredibly large and stood in scattered clumps over the white wilderness. The vast expanse of snow was checkered only by these gigantic pines and the poles that marked our road.

An exploration of some of the effects caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815, and a reflection on how humans respond to disasters.

This is something of a sequel to Tim Harford’s earlier episode on the unplayable piano.

In days I hope will come…

This essay examines the reasons for the demise of treaty-based arms control, reviews what will actually be lost by such a demise, and suggests some mitigation measures. It argues for a broader conception of arms control to include all forms of cooperative risk reduction and proposes new measures to prevent inadvertent escalation

An excellent introduction to the current (as of 2020) relationship between the United States and Russia with some general thoughts on the aims and means of diplomacy.

The Garden of Eden. My ancestors’ graves. A watermelon field in Central Texas…

Glenwood, Irvington, Scarborough, Poughkeepsie…

… the natural world does not function as home or household for its human children. Finding herself and her fellows to be outsiders, trespassers in a world that is distinctly “other,” she declares both nuturing and managerial responses to nature doomed

My God is still there, the one I prayed to as a boy:
he never answered but that didn’t keep me
from calling out to him.

It’s a very sobering thing to think about the long future.

People, where they live, their ways of life, and their interactions in different places around the world.

An introduction to the human landscape of Earth. Primarily aimed at undergraduates in the United States, the book should still be appropriate for anyone interested in learning more about the current, physical arrangement of humanity.

In 2009, an [anonymous] RFA cameraman followed the Mekong River from its source in Tibet to Vietnam and the South China Sea. Traveling more than 2,700 miles through six nations, they gathered stories from the local people as the river faced radical change.

Once there were coyotes…

Against my cheek, my tree was comfort

Here the ancient lava slid into the sea,
hissed up steam clouds, then cooled

my uncle
rose at dawn
and stepped outside—to find
his paddocks gone

What over the gable end and high up under tangled cloud
that the raven might be saying to its tumble-soaring mate…

Having escaped, I came back alive.

Centuries, minutes later, one might ask
How the hilt of a sword wandered so far from the smithy.

you could be walking through a fig orchard
when suddenly the wind cools and for a moment
you get a whiff of salt

As long as they get their money, they don’t care how many of us they kill off.

Targeted groups came to be attributed a biological or timeless essence, not because this was inevitable, we argue, but because of these failures to historicize inequality.

We can simply answer, from the Buddhist point of view, that we put ourselves here.

… a defense against reality

These prices are fake. And in being fake, they are warping our whole system: our relationship to the environment, to animals, and to ourselves.

Is pollution making us more stupider?

… even consciousness is shared, to a large degree, with a lot of other creatures, so death stops seeming like the enemy and starts seeming like one of the most ingenious kinds of design for keeping evolution circulating and keeping the experiment running and recombining. And to go from the terror [of death] into that sense that the experiment is sacred, not this one outcome of the experiment, is to immediately transform the way that you think even about very fundamental social, economic, and cultural things.

A passionate defense of the importance of Buddhist philosophy in charting a path out of the Anthropocene.

… human beings reset themselves to something altruistic, communitarian, resourceful, and imaginative after a disaster. We revert to something we already know how to do. The possibility of paradise is already within us as a default setting.

Disasters reveal, in their failure, how social hierarchies are a product of state violence, not “human nature.”

In that structure of feeling well, we had started taking acid…

A long and wide conversation on the author’s life and on our collective, possible futures.

Remember the earth whose skin you are

To contend seriously with the problem, you first have to let it in. And when I say “let it in” I mean “drag it towards you, press it down and sit with it.” Sit with it past the point of discomfort and pain and dispair until you can observe it without blinking, until its weight is just another thing about about you. In a way, “letting in” is too passive. What I’m talking about is fitting a hyperobject into your heart without it breaking.

A conversation about hope and despair as the effects of climate change bear down upon us.

… basic realities about the world in which we live

The Trump administration took down The World Factbook in February 2026 as a part of their war on facts.

Many of the site’s pages are still accessible on Archive.org as they were in January 2026 and the entire 2020 version is available on GitHub.

Capitalism thrives not by destroying natures but by putting natures to work as cheaply as possible.

You can read the introduction to his book online here.

… humans are driven by feelings. We feel the world, and when things feel right, we get a greater sense of meaning. And so it is with Buddhism.

On every horizon there were soaring peaks.

The Nandamula Cave was said to be somewhere on Nanda Pabbata, now named Nandadevi, which at 7,434 m (24,390 ft.) is India’s second highest mountain.

We need to turn towards the Earth rather than think so much about abstract, higher worlds. This is the world that has made us, and it’s a creative world. It’s truly an extraordinary place, and we haven’t given it enough credit I think, or appreciation.

… press pause. Grab some headphones. Don’t forget your keys and your mask. Then come back and we’ll head out. You good? All right, let’s go.

… today’s rich are far less materialistic, but a far greater threat to equality

A fascinating interview on social signaling today—its historical causes and its implications for inequality, policy, and society as a whole.

In 94 B.C., the Chinese historian Sima Qian wrote, “In the area south of the Yangtze the land is low and the climate humid; adult males die young.”

The world went from a situation where most of humanity had no need of money at all to one where today most of humanity struggles to survive on extremely small amounts of money. The graph casts this as a decline in poverty, but in reality what was going on was a process of dispossession

In which the hacker tourist ventures forth across the wide and wondrous meatspace of three continents, acquainting himself with the customs and dialects of previously unknown and unchronicled folk … and other material pertaining to the business and technology of Undersea Fiber-Optic Cables, as well as an account of the laying of the longest wire on Earth

A riveting account of what it takes to make the internet work.

There are three stages in scientific discovery. First, people deny that it is true, then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person.

We know a lot about the world. For example, that it weighs about 5.97×10²⁴ kg. But how do we know that?! You can’t just put it on a scale!

To answer this question (and many more), Bill Bryson interviewed a few scientists and uncovered the fascinating, brilliant, and often absurd history of modern science.

“Anthropocene” is the proposed name for a geologic epoch in which humans have become the major force determining the continuing livability of the earth. The word tells a big story: living arrangements that took millions of years to put into place are being undone in the blink of an eye. The hubris of conquerors and corporations makes it uncertain what we can bequeath to our next generations, human and not human.

This is a gorgeous pair of edited volumes collecting papers and artwork grappling with the enormity of climate change and painting a uniquely multifaceted portrait of our damaged planet. Better suited to the coffee-table than the night-stand, these hefty books contain not a single, pat message but just a series of snapshots from around our pale blue dot.

… the Sonora passed through the Golden Gate and steamed out upon the broad Pacific, heading south, carrying five hundred passengers, thirty-eight thousand letters, and a consigned shipment of gold totaling $1,595,497.13.

The fascinating and brilliantly told story of one ship pivotal to the California Gold Rush: its historic sinking and equally historic recovery.

I yearned to convey to [Charles Darwin] how marvelously his simple idea has flowered and itself evolved, informing countless new fields of inquiry, and to share with him the scientific news that would have eased his troubled mind: Earth is old.

An extraordinary retelling of the history of both the Earth and our understanding of it, which will stretch and stagger your temporal imagination.

Sprawling industrial complexes where armies of thousands [of workers] manufactured products from start to finish gave way to smaller, more specialized plants that shipped components and half-finished goods to one another in ever-lengthening supply chains. […] Once the world began to change, it changed very rapidly.

The remarkable story of how a metal box changed the world.