Politics Literature Arts Ideas

Climate Change

Bill McKibben

130 Degrees

This is going to be a century of crises, many of them more dangerous than what we’re living through now.

August 20, 2020 issue

Gerhard Richter: Iceberg in Mist, 1982; from ‘Gerhard Richter: Painting After All,’ an exhibition at the Met Breuer. For more on the exhibition, see Susan Tallman’s essay on pages 4–8 of this issue.

Jonathan Mingle

A World Without Ice

May 14, 2020 issue

Eric Klinenberg

The Great Green Hope

April 23, 2020 issue

Emily Raboteau

Lessons in Survival

The water is rising, and sooner or later we’ll have to move inland.

November 21, 2019 issue

Sophie Pinkham

Blood on the Ice

Bathsheba Demuth’s ‘Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait’

November 7, 2019 issue

Willa Glickman

New York's Rising Tides

Hurrican Sandy revealed just how poorly suited our system is to absorb the shock of climate change and particularly sea-level rise—and how unequally the effects are felt.

June 13, 2020

Alan Weisman

Burning Down the House

‘The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming’ by David Wallace-Wells and ‘Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?’ by Bill McKibben

August 15, 2019 issue

A firefighter taking a break from battling the King Fire, Fresh Pond, California, September 2014

William Finnegan

California Burning

We have entered the era of the megafire

August 16, 2018 issue

The Latest

San Francisco seen from Treasure Island as orange smoke and haze from multiple wildfires blankets the Bay Area, California, September 9, 2020

Anastasia Edel

The Big Smoke

It is hard not to think of California’s wildfire plight as a metaphor for America’s decline, though hopelessness is not the Californian way.

September 17, 2020

Monica Uszerowicz

Picturing Climate Crisis in Miami

FloodZone lays Miami’s underlying fractures bare: street-level billboard renderings of new apartments are fenced off by rain-weathered chain-link and sidewalks fractured by flooding.

May 23, 2020

An abandoned Standard Oil gas station, Tonalea, Arizona, 2008

Bill McKibben

Big Oil Runs Out of Gas

People used to worry that the fossil-fuel industry would hit “peak oil” and we’d run out of crude. It now seems far more likely that it’s going to run out of money instead.

May 12, 2020

Moms 4 Housing activist Dominique Walker standing in front of 2928 Magnolia Street, the house the group occupied starting in November 2019, declaring that housing is “a human right,

E. Tammy Kim

Moms 4 Housing & the Right to a Home

On a recent trip to Oakland, I glimpsed the potential of a coordinated, grassroots response to the housing emergency. Moms 4 Housing is inspiring change: community control of land, redefinition of private property through cooperatives and land trusts, and a constitutional right to housing.

March 9, 2020

Duel between Amazons, illustration from Collection des vases grecs de le Comte de M Lamberg, by Alexandre de Laborde, nineteenth century

Christopher Benfey

The Year of the Amazon?

If Jeff Bezos named his firm after the Amazon River, how did the river itself come to be called the Amazon? Was the rainforest once inhabited by golden-crowned women warriors mounted on fleet-footed steeds?

January 22, 2020

An earthquake-damaged building is demolished by controlled explosions, Christchurch, New Zealand, August 5, 2012

Harrison Stetler

‘Collapsologie’: How Things Fall Apart

The flippancy with which the collapsologues declare that a future of environmental disaster, economic meltdown, and societal failure is just around the corner can be quite chilling: “By 2035, the French Republic, the European Union, will not exist.”

January 21, 2020

Ember and thick smoke from bushfires, Braemar Bay, New South Wales, Australia, January 4, 2020

Tim Flannery

Australia: The Fires and Our Future

After these raging bushfires, I hope that Australia’s federal government will create a full national strategy for climate adaptation. But even that may prove to be too much. The best hope for change lies not with central government but with the states and industry.

January 16, 2020

Charlotta María Hauksdóttir: Topography Study XVI, 2018; from Hauksdóttir’s book A Sense of Place: Imprints from Iceland, to be published by Daylight in January 2020

Jenny Uglow

What the Weather Is

December 19, 2019 issue

The night sky on a clear night on the Canadian Prairies at Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park, Alberta, July 25, 2017

Alex Hutchinson

Why We Wish for Wilderness

Wilderness, the environmental historian Roderick Nash has argued, is not so much a place as an idea—one enshrined in the 1964 Wilderness Act’s somewhat whimsical legal definition of wilderness as “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”

November 6, 2019

Matt Smith as M, and Claire Foy as W, in Lungs, directed by Matthew Warchus at the Old Vic Theatre, London, 2019

Kate Maltby

When Climate Change Moves Center-Stage

Where Rosmerholm depicted ideological struggles in a small Norwegian town during the industrial revolution, Lungs feels as though it could have been written about a pair of Extinction Rebellion activists.

October 28, 2019