HAVE we become inured to crisis? Whether the cost of living, mental health or the climate, activists and experts raise the spectre of existential times, only for the daily demands of life and the stea...

Science Fiction Ecologies: Worldmaking with Butler, Le Guin, and Merril by Shelley Streeby. (NYU Press. August 2026). 376 Pages. Octavia E. Butler often meditated on change, brainstorming across various archival forms on its meanings and how best to adapt to it. In wire-bound notebooks she used for journaling, Butler speculated in 1981 that “[science fiction] SF readers and writers were more prepared to deal with change since in their reading and writing they practice dealing with it.” Butler believed this made science fiction “one of our more useful and undervalued tools to combat the kind of shortsightedness that makes us fear change, deny it, or become unable to cope with it.” Atop another journal page, Butler wrote “Short-sightedness—the environment,” calling science fiction a way of “Lengthening the View.” In 1991, Butler took notes on the words environment and ecology from Robert E. Ricklef’s 1973 book Ecology: The Economy of Nature, which she borrowed from the Los Angeles Public Library (LAPL). This book helped establish the field of ecology, went through many editions, and was widely used as a textbook in colleges and universities. In a blue medium-sized spiral-bound notebook Butler kept during the 1990s to jot down her responses to...

The first thing that struck us wasn’t the missing trees, but the missing water. In May 2026, we visited the Sundarbans, a mangrove forest in the delta where the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna rivers meet in the Bay of Bengal. We went there expecting a story about the mangroves, the tangled, salt-tolerant forests that are supposed to be the last line of defence against cyclones and rising seas. What we found instead was a dry pond, cracked and empty, in a delta where water was never supposed to run out. A few months earlier it had held fish that fed families. Now it held nothing, and the family that once worked it had joined a self-help group, pooling savings from neighbours to try to make ends meet. That pond has stayed with us longer than any statistic about mangrove loss. It’s a small, specific failure, but one that’s occurring across an ecosystem where four million people depend on for food, income and shelter. The Sundarbans is often discussed as an ecological story: it is the world’s largest mangrove forest, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a nursery for water and land creatures. That framing isn’t wrong, but it doesn’t tell...

Atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations and global carbon dioxide emissions: State of the Climate 2024

YouTube video by Taylor Lorenz

Wet-bulb temperatures prevent the body from cooling down. Modelling suggests that if we don't bring down greenhouse gas emissions, wet-bulb temperatures could regularly exceed dangerous benchmarks in ...

We are pleased to announce the publication of a new article, “Positive images of heat waves reduce the effects of messages about extreme heat among U.S. adults” in the journal Environmental Communicat...