The Wider World
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The material and historical context in which we find ourselves.
Workers collect salt in đòn gánh baskets under a cloudy sunset in Ninh Hòa, Vietnam in May 2014. The salt is collected from evaporated sea water in one of the many clever tricks humans use to extract useful substances from their environment. (Tycho Shansov, CC BY-SA 3.0)
Table of Contents
Books (13)
Featured:
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390 pages
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⭐ Recommended
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⭐ Recommended224 pages[recommended but under copyright]
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Canonical Works (3)
Readings (18)
Featured:
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⭐ Recommended
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.
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⭐ Recommended
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.
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Capitalism thrives not by destroying natures but by putting natures to work as cheaply as possible.
43 pages -
⭐ Recommended
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
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⭐ Recommended
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.
13 pages -
… 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
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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
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⭐ Recommended
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).
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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.”
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It’s a very sobering thing to think about the long future.
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Fish and their feces play a hugely important and vastly underrated role in ocean chemistry and the carbon cycle that shapes Earth’s climate
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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.
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and no his smile isn’t much
like a skeleton at all. And no
his neighborhood is not like a war zone
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Audio/Video (39)
Featured:
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🥇 Best of
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.
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⭐ Recommended
How deeply understanding the dependent origination of the chicken nugget helps us understand the entire modern world and how it got the way it is.
47 min -
… though money is an idea, basically, it represents stuff, and stuff is made of carbon
1h 15m -
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.
61 min -
Is pollution making us more stupider?
52 min -
A song written for a friend who had the courage and wisdom to leave a toxic relationship.
19 min -
Hanko, sometimes called insho, are the carved stamp seals that people in Japan often use in place of signatures.
39 min -
We’re not going to get away with this forever. I mean there’s a price to be paid for this kind of materialism
36 min -
The story of the Axolotl is man’s new relationship with nature.
32 min -
13 min -
⭐ Recommended
They are not new, these most ancient of divinities.
Our clamor woke them from the subdivided soil.
They rise to rule us6 min -
⭐ Recommended
my uncle
rose at dawn
and stepped outside—to find
his paddocks gone5 min -
⭐ Recommended
you could be walking through a fig orchard
when suddenly the wind cools and for a moment
you get a whiff of salt5 min -
… back in the 1800s, Ellis Chesbrough was the man. And no one has ever worked harder to save Chicago from its own poop.
19 min -
Having escaped, I came back alive.
5 min -
Against my cheek, my tree was comfort
5 min -
In days I hope will come…
5 min -
Glenwood, Irvington, Scarborough, Poughkeepsie…
5 min -
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.
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The Garden of Eden. My ancestors’ graves. A watermelon field in Central Texas…
5 min -
Here the ancient lava slid into the sea,
hissed up steam clouds, then cooled5 min -
Centuries, minutes later, one might ask
How the hilt of a sword wandered so far from the smithy.5 min -
What over the gable end and high up under tangled cloud
that the raven might be saying to its tumble-soaring mate…5 min
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