Welcome to the Anthropocene. This greeting is belated, of course. We have all been here the whole 
of our lives, without knowing it for most of our days. The Anthropocene is a span…

A careful reading of Walden; or, Life in the Woods makes it clear that Thoreau never intended his cabin to be a solitary hermitage, although fans and detractors alike often misunderstand…

Here are two sets of statements from far-distant opposites in the climate change debate. The first is from Naomi Klein, who in her book This Changes Everything paints a bleak picture…

The Kyrgyz soldier stepped quietly out of the dark green bushes and swung his Kalashnikov rifle in the direction of our car. Another emerged and did the same. Their checkpoint was…

Jerry Mitrovica has been overturning accepted wisdom for decades. A solid Earth geophysicist at Harvard, he studies the internal structure and processes of the Earth, which has implications…

Julia Rothman is an illustrator and author who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her latest book is Nature Anatomy.

Two hundred years ago, the greatest eruption in Earth’s recorded history took place. Mount Tambora—located on Sumbawa Island in the East Indies—blew itself up with apocalyptic…

John Muir was an idiot. “Climb the mountains and get their good tidings,” he wrote in his 1901 book Our National Parks. “Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows…

Nothing has caused climate scientists quite as much recent trouble as the so-called “global warming hiatus.” Not only did this approximately 14-year lull in the rise of global…

When we think of storing information today, we conjure up rows of giant computer servers that house endless streams of digital data. All the world’s information, it seems, will one…