Politics

Climate Change

Planet Ooze

We cannot grow the crops that feed eight billion people and counting without phosphorus. At the rate we waste this precious element, how long will supplies last?

April 10, 2025 issue

Jordan Thomas

Smoke, Heat, Flame

California’s recent firestorms may be unprecedented in their intensity and damage, but what seems like a new crisis is just the latest chapter in a longer history of exploitation.

February 15, 2025

Adam Hanieh

The Climate Finance Racket

By investing in climate finance while accelerating fossil fuel production, the Gulf states are playing all sides of the energy market.

November 11, 2024

Bill McKibben

The Pope and the Planet

A sweeping, radical, and highly persuasive critique of how we inhabit this planet

August 13, 2015 issue

Fintan O’Toole with Elizabeth Kolbert, Bill McKibben, and Jonathan Mingle

Climate Action

May 7, 2025

Vanessa Ogle

Shipping’s Shadow World

The shipping industry, which moves more than 80 percent of global trade, is poorly regulated, environmentally dangerous, and rife with labor violations.

April 9, 2024

Michelle Nijhuis

Life in the Ruins

Two new books consider the delusion of the human quest to be free from the constraints of nature.

November 21, 2024 issue

Verlyn Klinkenborg

What the Ocean Holds

Most of our planet’s biosphere exists in the dark of the deep ocean. Will we protect it? Or will we cash it in without concern for the harm we’re causing?

October 17, 2024 issue

On Mountains

Bill McKibben

The Mountain Hedonist

“The long-held aesthetic arguments for a simpler life are suddenly being seen to coincide neatly with the hard-headed calculations of the atmospheric chemists.”

April 11, 1991 issue

Colin Thubron in the Karnali River valley of Nepal, near the Tibetan border, May 2009

Pico Iyer

On the Sacred Mountain

“In To a Mountain in Tibet, the most private of scholar-gypsies brings mysteries even closer to home.”

April 7, 2011 issue

Olivia Paschal

Who Owns the Mountains?

Hurricane Helene has revived urgent questions about the politics of land in Appalachia. In western North Carolina, those questions have everything to do with the booming tourist economy.

November 3, 2024

Nathaniel Rich

Writing Like a Mountain

In the novels of the Swiss writer Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, people become ants and mountains become menacing gods.

May 15, 2025 issue

Conservation and Extinction

David Quammen

The Concrete Jungle

Evolution is still happening, sometimes briskly, and in response to the single greatest agent of environmental change on the planet: us.

November 8, 2018 issue

Natalie Angier

Claw & Order

What do we owe nature, and how might we do a better job of coexisting with species that do not exist for our pleasure and sustenance?

November 4, 2021 issue

Sophie Pinkham

Blood on the Ice

“As humans hunted and mined at an ever-accelerating pace, they did so with little understanding of the cyclical and finite aspects of life on earth, or of the ways their actions would disrupt the larger ecosystem.”

November 7, 2019 issue

Elizabeth Kolbert

They Covered the Sky, and Then…

Perhaps, in ethical terms, it doesn’t much matter whether overhunting was or was not the sole cause of the passenger pigeon’s extinction. Practically speaking, though, it matters a good deal.

January 9, 2014 issue

The Latest

Jonathan Mingle

An EPA Without Science

The agency’s rollbacks under Lee Zeldin suggest that Trump’s war on the administrative state has become, effectively, a war on the future.

May 16, 2025

Olivia Paschal

Who Owns the Mountains?

Hurricane Helene has revived urgent questions about the politics of land in Appalachia. In western North Carolina, those questions have everything to do with the booming tourist economy.

November 3, 2024

Jonathan Mingle

Planet 2025

Donald Trump’s war on what he calls the “deep state” and his broader war on climate science are neatly aligned.

October 30, 2024

John Washington

Burning Up

Reading John Vaillant’s Fire Weather and Jeff Goodell’s The Heat Will Kill You First, you may wonder if civilization is getting so hot that we’re no longer thinking straight.

May 9, 2024 issue

Michelle Nijhuis

The Digital Planet

Digital technologies may worsen environmental problems, but they can also assist in the protection and restoration of ecosystems —and strengthen our relationships with them.

April 18, 2024 issue

Christopher Bosso

Eyes on the Farm Bill!

Congress’s periodic battles over the Farm Bill often pass unnoticed, but the document effectively determines what, how, and how much we eat.

March 10, 2024

Verlyn Klinkenborg

The Cost of Our Debris

The stated purpose of Jay Owens’s new book is to “think with dust,” specifically “human-made” dust and what it reveals—the forensic fingerprint, so to speak, that our species has left upon this planet.

March 21, 2024 issue

Adam Hanieh

‘Every Molecule of Hydrocarbon Will Come Out’

Gulf States are increasingly shaping global climate policy, even as they plan to accelerate fossil fuel production.

February 21, 2024

Emily Raboteau

A New Environmental Canon

New books by Camille Dungy and Elizabeth Rush argue that the ethics of care we often associate with maternity is crucial in combating issues as large as the climate crisis.

February 22, 2024 issue

Rachel Nolan

The Forest Eaters

In 2017, the Brazilian journalist Eliane Brum moved from São Paulo to a small city in the Amazon. Her new book vividly uncovers how the rainforest is illegally seized and destroyed.

February 22, 2024 issue