An interview on what in the hell happened at COP25 Tiger in a Tropical Storm, Henri Rousseau, 1891 So last week I was talking about how climate change is this collective problem with collective solutions and how we have to make personal changes while also pushing for systemic changes. But
A different sort of guide to end of year giving Dante running from the three beasts, William Blake, 1824-27 So we have an international trip coming up fast which is going to vastly expand the household’s carbon footprint and I’m doing that thing right now where I
It must have been Thanksgiving Sanjay P. K., Cave painting at Petta-kere, South Sulawesi, Indonesia. Above is a photo of some of the oldest cave art ever found, maybe over 40,000 years old, from an island in Indonesia. When some research about it was published in 2014, I
It's the men that serve both god and devil that you have to fear Detail of an illustration from a prose adaptation of Pèlerinage de la vie humaine by Guillaume de Deguileville, late fifteenth or early sixteenth century. Via Rabih Alameddine. There is a lot of debate in
Things could go either way Rainy Day, Boston, 1885, Frederick Childe Hassam In 2017, a three-year campaign by housing justice advocates to curb Boston’s eviction crisis culminated with a tenant rights bill called the Jim Brooks Act being quietly shuffled into a corner of the legislature to die.
Prepare to jump not knowing if there is any place to land This week I was talking to some people for an article about the Living Building Challenge, specifically a new building in Atlanta that is seeking to qualify under this super-rigorous sustainability standard. It’s kind of hard
[Wind howling] This is the last Crisis Palace before Halloween so it will be a very special frightening edition a holiday spooktacular you might say. If you are faint of heart consider yourself warned. — In May of 1845, the HMS Terror and HMS Erebus set out for the Arctic on
Take a moment to appreciate that feeling of all the things working There’s a fissure in the climate community around the extent to which racial and economic justice issues should be a driving force behind climate solutions. I’ve written about this divide often, because for many years mainstream
You turn the key, harm is being done. Earlier this year, two miles west of my house, a woman named Marilyn Wentworth was crossing the street to get a coffee at her favorite shop, a little family-owned place I go to all the time. As she used the crosswalk
It was 3,000 people arguing with 2 million people This week I’m going to reach way back into the archives to share an article I wrote about the creation of the Quabbin Reservoir in central Massachusetts. A huge engineering feat—and a surprisingly common tactic as the nation
Wild possibilities and the heroes at the edges or at your side “Political awareness without activism means looking at the devastation, your face turned toward the center of things. Activism itself can generate hope because it already constitutes an alternative and turns away from the corruption at center to face
I want you to panic and act as if the house was on fire Pretty much as long as climate change has been in the realm of public dialogue, there’s been this oddly accepted wisdom that there are certain ways you should and should not talk about the issue.