Wild Earth 12, no. 4, features an interview with Sylvia Earle on “Our Oceans, Ourselves,” essays on worldwide fishing and consumer conscience, on launching a sea ethic, and the food web complexity in kelp forest ecosystems.
Edward Burtynsky’s photographs, as beautiful as they are horrifying, capture views of the Earth altered by mankind.
This article discusses the shift in perception regarding polluted water. When did perceptions of polluted water change, when was it no longer considered a part of everyday life? And what caused the tide to turn?
This paper focuses on the 1987 to 1988 dumping of hazardous industrial waste in Koko, Nigeria. The paper critically analyzes the number, content, and contexts of cartoons that covered the toxic-waste dumping.
In the Middle Ages, the main energy sources were firewood, charcoal, animals, and human muscle power. By 1860, 93 percent of the energy expended in England and Wales came from coal. Why did the transition occur when it did and why was it so slow?
This article considers the various factors that hindered intensification of industrial activity and retarded national economic growth. Eventually the pressure of social and cultural factors encouraged abandonment of the use of an abundant and relatively cheap resource—peat—and promoted the use of a scarcer and more expensive alternative—coal.
This article examines in detail the trends in turf production and consumption in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, noting its striking resilience.
This essay offers an historical sociometabolic perspective on the changing relationship between energy and land use during industrialization.
Literary scholar Hsuan L. Hsu discusses the adverse long-time effects of nuclear weapons testing and waste disposal—protracted impacts which often go unnoticed.
The cartography of nuclear bombings and nuclear waste can be understood and visualized in different ways depending on who is drawing the map. This is a chapter of the virtual exhibition “Representing Environmental Risk in the Landscapes of US Militarization” by literary scholar Hsuan L. Hsu.
