Politics Literature Arts Ideas

Climate Change

Mark O’Connell

Uncanny Planet

A new collection of essays by Nathaniel Rich argues that there is no going back to whatever might be meant by “nature.”

July 22, 2021 issue

Chukchi hunting a gray whale in the Bering Sea, Chukotka, Russia, June 2018

Sophie Pinkham

Blood on the Ice

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

November 7, 2019 issue

Jim Shultz

The Renewable Energy Rebels

In rural New York State, big wind and solar energy projects are running into determined local opposition. What is to be done?

December 3, 2020

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

Jonathan Mingle

A World Without Ice

The project before us is paradoxical: thinking on long time scales while acting with furious urgency.

May 14, 2020 issue

Willa Glickman

New York's Rising Tides

Hurricane 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

By exhuming hundreds of millions of years’ worth of buried organic matter and burning it, we built our dazzling modern civilization, not noticing that its wastes were amassing overhead.

August 15, 2019 issue

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

William Finnegan

California Burning

Fires are bigger, hotter, faster, more expensive and difficult to fight, and more destructive than ever before. We have entered the era of the megafire.

August 16, 2018 issue

The Latest

Bill McKibben

The Future Is Electric

Because electricity is so much more efficient than combustion, totally electrifying our country would cut primary energy use about in half.

November 4, 2021 issue

Willa Glickman

The Future of Fracking

New technology has allowed access to more oil and gas in the US than ever expected. Will we be able to turn away from this dangerous windfall before it’s too late?

May 5, 2021

Regina Marler

The Emergency Everywhere

In Madeleine Watts’s The Inland Sea and Maxim Loskutoff’s Ruthie Fear, young women navigate danger from men and from themselves, against a backdrop of relentless climate catastrophe.

March 25, 2021 issue

Frederic Wehrey

The Lost Rivers of Owens Valley

Water—who owns it, who uses it—has shaped this landscape from the Paiutes’ irrigation canals to the Los Angeles aqueduct. And it is a history in which my own family played a part.

February 16, 2021

Bill McKibben

Biden’s Most Daunting Adversary

October 31, 2020

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