First it was a fire, then it was a color, and before too long it became a regime unto itself
As familiar as they are, these orange maps can only depict a rehearsal, a prelude. In the pre-vaccine moment the Covid maps were terrifying, but examining them, you could imagine a future after orange. One feels very different looking at the climate maps. There is no de-escalating from orange.
June 23, 2026
The idea of buying Greenland is less a historical deviation than a revival of a longstanding practice of buying sovereignty, one that goes hand in hand with the expropriation of land by force
Denying that history could have been otherwise or making conquest subject to some unwritten statute of limitations are both ways of cloaking not just the US’s imperial past but its continuation into the present, with or without Kalaallit Nunaat. Buying Greenland was more than a threat to NATO, it was a threat to make American empire visible again.
May 29, 2026
At the Museum of Errantry
Cárdenas engages the arid landscape, the dead tree, the dried-out wood, and sculpts into existence a beginning—a way into the future eked out of a barren present.
When salmon women summer camp ends, what will I do?
October 7, 2025
If ever there were bullshit carbon credits carted off to the market, these were the ones
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On ecopoetry
Eco-confessionalism marshals the self-reflexivity of poetic language, its distance from everyday communication, to register commitments without reifying them, to critique the present without lapsing into fatalism about the future. Looking outward, to the desperate reality of our world, and inward, to its own lyric preconditions, this new poetry is learning how to speak, subtly and capaciously, about the biggest crisis in history.
September 4, 2025
The ability to impose pollution on others is another aspect of class rule
Read MoreSeptember 3, 2025
A conversation with Lydia Pelot-Hobbs
Countless people are left in harm’s way because of the state’s refusal to make evacuation plans. The hurricane ends up coming through weaker than expected—but then the levees break. Within hours, 80 percent of the city is underwater.
You’re not in charge, the plant said to me, as clearly as if it were a person.
January 17, 2025
A conversation with Jordan Thomas on fire suppression and prescribed burning in the megafire era
The job parameters for wildland firefighters haven’t changed significantly since the 1980s. What has changed significantly since the ’80s is the climate. So essentially, they’re working with the job expectations, compensation, and health care packages of a planet in which they fight fires for maybe 10 percent of their time and spend the other 90 percent doing forest management projects. But now wildland firefighters spend at least 90 percent of their time fighting fires, if not 100 percent of their time. Their compensation hasn’t kept up with that, partly because it’s impossible to increase pay and benefits at the federal level when you need Republican congressional approval to do so.
January 16, 2025
What will it take?
You can almost hear the chattering class’s chattering teeth as they balance the need to generate clicks with their sanctimonious shock at the public’s hatred for Brian Thompson, the company he ran, and the industry he represents. Mangione (allegedly) took a straight shot at capital, and now popular ire is being directed at CEOs rather than Congress, the free market rather than the immiserating state. This won’t do.
October 22, 2024
Call it Micropolis.
