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...
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...
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...
Joseph G. Manning, Francis Ludlow, Alexander R. Stine, William R. Boos, Michael Sigl, & Jennifer R. Marlon, “Volcanic suppression of Nile summer flooding triggers revolt...
Megadrought and Collapse is the first book to treat in one volume the current paleoclimatic and archaeological evidence of megadrought events coincident with major...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Twentieth century environmental protection delivered significant improvements in America’s air and water quality and led companies to manage their waste, use of toxic...
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...
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....
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...
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...
In Los Angeles, local environmentalists have long advocated for the city to embrace distributed green infrastructure installations to manage stormwater flows and recharge...
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...
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...
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...
