Contesting Coyote Contests

Language bends and buckles under pressure of climate change. Take the adjective ‘glacial’. I recently came across an old draft of my PhD dissertation on which my advisor had scrawled the rebuke: ‘You’re proceeding at a glacial pace. You’re skating on thin ice.’

In eastern Tasmania, sea surface temperatures have increased at four times the average global rate, according to Johnson, who along with colleague Scott Ling has closely studied the region’s kelp forest losses.

We are, one hears, spending too much time on Appalachia. There are too many dispatches from woebegone towns...

As climatologists define it, the Little Ice Age was a long-term cooling of the Northern Hemisphere between 1300 and 1850...

Every round-trip ticket on flights from New York to London, keep in mind, costs the Arctic three more square meters of ice.

On the ancient river, seagull rock crests out of the waters. An outcrop within its sight is thorned by a few young silhouettes, taking turns plunging into the river some feet below. Riverboats and water taxis, white river cruise-ships weave short and cyclical tours between the two shores.

Much of COPINH’s power lies in combining political radicalism — anti-military, anti-patriarchal, anti-capitalist, and anti-American — with a deep conservative attachment to the Lenca peoples’ heritage and land.

Since November 9th, many Americans have been searching for ways to incorporate political activism into their everyday lives, to get out of the echo chambers that keep them among only like-minded people.

Over the course of 2016, the global security landscape darkened as the international community failed to come effectively to grips with humanity’s most pressing existential threats, nuclear weapons and climate change.

Nature and landscape are palimpsests of history and social violence more than they are alternatives to them. They show back to the observer the durability and definiteness of the world people have made so far.

A flock of starlings in flight is called a “murmuration,” one of the most pleasing collective nouns. It’s also one of nature’s most pleasing sights, an undulating mass of thousands of black dots that coalesce into hypnotic shapes, like an airborne Rorschach test or a lava lamp.

Living in rural Vermont, I enjoy proximity to wilderness, though I observe its sickness at close range. In spring, my family marks the return of swallows and red-winged blackbirds on the barn door.

With so little to guide predictions, the reality of a Trump presidency has become a national Rorschach test. Conservatives and the anti-establishment imagine an ascendant Trump will set a path for a more competitive national economy, smaller government, and a stronger defense.

Peabody Energy is, by its own description, the “largest private sector coal company in the world.” It’s also bankrupt. The company, based in St. Louis, filed for Chapter 11 this past April. Today, on the news of Donald Trump’s victory, Peabody’s stock surged almost fifty per cent.

On rare occasions, the townsfolk of Amherst, Massachusetts, would catch a glimpse of a ghostly figure dressed in white, leaning over to tend her flowers by flickering lantern light.

We meet a fat diamondback five minutes down the trail. He is stretched across the path, dozing in the shade of a juniper bush.