The Road to Climate Hell Is Downhill—and Scenic

Death Valley’s Present Is a Window Into the Future

If the world really is going to hell, you should get your brakes checked. The ride is going to be very downhill.

I learned that lesson, among others, after my own brakes started to smoke while descending down, down, down Highway 190 into California’s answer to the underworld—Death Valley.

I did not run into the Devil on this Death Valley visit. The thermometer on these winter days never surpassed 70, and Satan, suggested one local tour guide, feels more comfortable this time of year in the hellish Southern hemisphere summer of Australia’s …

What Asteroids Can Teach Us About Climate Change | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

What Asteroids Can Teach Us About Climate Change

Scientists Are Aware of the Perils of Near-Earth Objects and Rising Temperatures. Humanity Can’t Come Together to Deal With Them

On June 30, 1908, a sudden blast knocked down over 2,000 square kilometers of forest in a sparsely inhabited part of Siberia. Witnesses saw a fireball from hundreds of miles …

Extreme Heat Is Boring

But Can Feeling Trapped Indoors Motivate Us to Climate Action?

The first time I met someone from Tucson, Arizona, I asked him a burning—pardon the pun—question. How did people there tolerate the summer heat? I pictured my childhood summers in …

Is There Such a Thing as a Sustainable Mining Boom?

An Early-20th-Century Copper Company Has Lessons for the Industry Today

In the Western U.S. and the north of Chile, large-scale mining has produced similar landscapes of extraction: open-pit and underground mines, smelter stacks, and large masonry structures. Transportation networks connected …

There Is No ‘I’ in the Climate Crisis

Connection and Interdependence Can’t Capture Carbon But Can Get to the Root of the Problem

The environmentalist Paul Hawken says, “The most complex, radical climate technology is the human heart and mind, not a solar panel.” What would it mean to imagine the heart and …

Is Puerto Rico a Global Model for Disaster Recovery?

In the Wake of Three Hurricanes—And Centuries of Exploitation—Islanders Turned to One Another for Relief

When Hurricane Fiona hit Puerto Rico on September 18, 2022, the U.S. colony had still not fully recovered from Hurricanes Irma and Maria, in 2017. Collapsed bridges had not been …