How do you solve a problem like the Salton Sea?

[We welcome Traci Brynne Voyles to the blog, to kick off a series this spring on Environmental Justice and Environmental Health. The video of her talk in the associated speaker series is available here.]

For the past decade and a half, I’ve been immersed in studying environmental disasters. I’ve focused on the ways they are shaped by various intersecting power structures: Continue reading →

A moral cartography for the Anthropocene

We welcome Manuel Arias Maldonado, of the University of Malága, as a guest on the blog . . . click for his bio, or go to the “Who we are” tab. This post summarizes an argument in his recent book Environment & Society: Socionatural Relations in the Anthropocene (Springer, 2015).


If the Anthropocene were just a scientific category dealing with natural phenomena, we would not feel so concerned about it. But, as Mike Ellis and Zev Trachtenberg have rightly argued, the Anthropocene is not Continue reading →

Do we need “the Anthropocene?”

As 2014 came to a close I received a wonderfully provocative e-mail from my friend and colleague in the Environmental Political Theory community John Meyer. He wrote that Continue reading →

“From Biophilia to Cosmophilia: The Role of Biological and Physical Sciences in Promoting Sustainability”

CITATION:
Lucas F. Johnston. 2010. Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 7-23.
ON-LINE AVAILABILITY:
DOI: 10.1558/jsrnc.v4il.7
ABSTRACT:
Ideas from the life sciences and the physical sciences, particularly the ideas that Continue reading →

Earth, Life, and Time: What is Natural?

Life on Earth has always altered its environment.1 “Deep” time records major shifts in atmospheric composition, for example, as life evolved photosynthesis, leading to a massive transfer of CO2 from the atmosphere to the biosphere. Given this, is the large-scale injection into the atmosphere of anthropogenically released carbon a completely natural consequence of biotic activity?

Atmospheric levels of CO2 have always changed, attributable in part to life — and well before the influence of humans. On geologic time scales such fluctuation results from Continue reading →

“The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis”

CITATION:
Lynn White, Jr. 1967. Science, Vol. 155, No. 3767, pp. 1203-7.
ON-LINE AVAILABILITY:
ABSTRACT:

This article claims that the modern ecological crisis arose out of an ethic derived from Continue reading →