Photo Essay
For the last few years, northward breezes have pushed more water from the Gulf onto the land—breaching marshes, overtopping the banks of bayous, and flooding roadways and people’s yards. Some of the submerged roads are the only ways in and out of narrow bayou-side communities strung along South Louisiana. Louisiana is at the forefront of »
Photo Essay
The Snapshot: Climate issue features more than 60 photographs and accompanying short reflections from artists, activists, photojournalists, and scientists to provide a “snapshot” look at climate impacts across the South. As climatologist Angel Hsu writes in the issue’s introduction, we set out with this issue to make the “invisible visible,” “using images and words from the »
Memoir
I have lived on a small farm in southern Vermont for the last thirteen years. One year, it simply did not snow, and the low-grade environmental anxiety I’d been swallowing blossomed into something ferocious, blocking my imaginative impulse. I felt as though I couldn’t write fiction anymore. I poured my energy into becoming an environmental »
Memoir
I misspent my youth wandering the mountains of eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina, spending as much time as I could on long camping trips into the backwoods. It was there that I found where my internal compass pointed, namely, toward a longing to understand how the earth and its environment worked, why and how »
Interview
Katharine Hayhoe is the Chief Scientist for The Nature Conservancy. She is also Paul Whitfield Horn Distinguished Professor and Endowed Chair in Public Policy and Public Law in the Public Administration program of the Department of Political Science at Texas Tech University. Hayhoe has published over 125 peer-reviewed abstracts and publications and coauthored Downscaling Techniques for High-Resolution »
Essay
Climate change is rapidly transforming our world in ways both visible and invisible. Greenhouse gas pollution—invisible to the human eye—is causing climate change, with widespread impacts to which we now bear witness. Rising temperatures have caused the loss of more than 28 trillion tons of Earth’s ice between 1994 and 2017, roughly the volume of »
Essay
Telling one’s own story is a way of asserting identity. It is simultaneously a fundamental responsibility and an inherent gift for each human being—and is often one of the first casualties of colonialism and oppression. Indigenous storytellers, knowledge holders, and practitioners who tell their own stories have long been viewed as superstitious or primitive by »
Photo Essay
The city of Baytown, Texas, home to the sprawling ExxonMobil refinery and across the ship channel from the San Jacinto Monument, sits on a peninsula jutting southwest into the upper reaches of Galveston Bay. It once housed the picturesque Brownwood subdivision, where, beginning in the 1950s, executives of Humble Oil lived midcentury dreams of postwar »
Memoir
When I was ten, for my father’s fifty-seventh birthday, I made him an acrostic poem card. After the “B” for “Brave” and the “R” for “Really Wonderful” in his first name BORIS was the “E” for “Expert on Aldo Leopold” in our last name ZEIDE. Aldo Leopold, as in the renowned author of A Sand »
Photo Essay
At first, you’re not quite sure what you’re looking at: a windshield blotted like a Jackson Pollock painting; twin smokestacks squatting over pale water; a sawn tree stump, so red at its center you’d think it was bleeding; land so dry it looks like a rash. These are the images photographer Will Warasila captured in »
Memoir
The sweetest mulberries in Durham, North Carolina, grow in Maplewood Cemetery, on a tree that shades the grave of Leon Jeffers. Every year, in late May, I forage my way downtown, heading north from the Lakewood neighborhood. The first tree teems with a swarm of bees so profuse that the branches seem to vibrate. The »
Essay
On a steamy June afternoon in 1970, a crowd gathered outside the Sea Pines Company’s sprawling headquarters on the southern end of Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. Led by the Rev. I. DeQuincey Newman of the South Carolina NAACP, fifty African American protestors came to deliver a message to Charles Fraser, the head of Sea »