Publications

July 15, 2018
This article by Yale doctoral student Yuan J. Chen examines the creation, preservation, and destruction of the defensive forest that the Northern Song built in Hebei...
April 17, 2018
Landscape art in the early 19th century was guided by two rival concepts: the picturesque, which emphasized touristic pleasures and visual delight, and the sublime, an...
April 17, 2018
Biophilia is the theory that people possess an inherent affinity for nature, which developed during the long course of human evolution. In recent years, studies have revealed...
October 17, 2017
Joseph G. Manning, Francis Ludlow, Alexander R. Stine, William R. Boos, Michael Sigl, & Jennifer R. Marlon, “Volcanic suppression of Nile summer flooding triggers revolt...
October 2, 2017
Megadrought and Collapse is the first book to treat in one volume the current paleoclimatic and archaeological evidence of megadrought events coincident with major...
Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest Stats
August 23, 2017
An account of all the new and surprising evidence now available for the beginnings of the earliest civilizations that contradict the standard narrative Why did humans...
Richard Prum, "The Evolution of Beauty"
May 3, 2017
A major reimagining of how evolutionary forces work, revealing how mating preferences—what Darwin termed “the taste for the beautiful”—create the extraordinary range of...
Alan Mikhail, “Under Osman’s Tree: The Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and Environmental History,” (Chicago, 2017)
March 20, 2017
Osman, the founder of the Ottoman Empire, had a dream in which a tree sprouted from his navel. As the tree grew, its shade covered the earth; as Osman’s empire grew, it, too...
March 16, 2017
For many Westerners, the name Vietnam evokes images of a bloody televised American war that generated a firestorm of protest and brought conflict into their living rooms. In...
Joanna Radin, “Life on Ice,” (Chicago, 2017)
March 15, 2017
After the atomic bombing at the end of World War II, anxieties about survival in the nuclear age led scientists to begin stockpiling and freezing hundreds of thousands of...
March 15, 2017
Twentieth century environmental protection delivered significant improvements in America’s air and water quality and led companies to manage their waste, use of toxic...
March 12, 2017
As the planet warms and the polar ice caps melt, naturally occurring cold is a resource of growing scarcity. At the same time, energy-intensive cooling technologies are...
February 13, 2017
We live in a warming world. Human activity has increased the carbon in the atmosphere, depleted the Earth’s capacity to adapt to change, and temperatures are rapidly rising....
January 11, 2017
The moral values and interpretive systems of religions are crucially involved in how people imagine the challenges of sustainability and how societies mobilize to enhance...
December 7, 2016
Even to an untrained eye, Iran’s environmental landscape appears bleak. Drying or dried up lakes, polluted rivers and brooks, thirsty cities with polluted air, sandstorms...
September 10, 2016
In Los Angeles, local environmentalists have long advocated for the city to embrace distributed green infrastructure installations to manage stormwater flows and recharge...
September 9, 2016
In Placing Outer Space Lisa Messeri traces how the place-making practices of planetary scientists transform the void of space into a cosmos filled with worlds that can be...
September 1, 2016
From Delmonico’s to Sylvia’s to Chez Panisse, a daring and original history of dining out in America as told through ten legendary restaurants.   Combining a historian’s...
July 10, 2016
For most of the twentieth century, maps were indispensable. They were how governments understood, managed, and defended their territory, and during the two world wars they...