Distillations magazine

Unexpected Stories from Science’s Past

Environment

Our impact on the natural and built worlds

Man in hardhat and work clothes turning valve on a machine
Environment

Water and Power

Could a century-old aqueduct point the way to Los Angeles’s clean energy future?

Color photo of a cow standing in a sunny Alpine pasture
Environment

A Tragedy with No End

Why does Garrett Hardin’s pessimistic fable haunt our collective imagination?

Color illustration of a desert scene with a car in the foreground and storm clouds on the horizon
Environment

Everyday Monsoons

Washes and other gaps in the Sonoran Desert.

Woman inside ocean exploring suit in open air
Environment

Sylvia Earle and the Call of the Deep

Adventure and tangled interests under the sea.

Black and white photo of girl with a cotton plant
Environment

Rings of Fire

Arsenic cycles through racism and empire in the Americas.

Group of eleven older men posing with a large taxidermy fish
Environment

Fish Hacks

Often dismissed as a “trash fish,” the porgy anchors black maritime culture.

Black and white engraving of a man grafting a tree in front of a farmhouse
Environment

Forests of the Future

Modern agricultural practices are unsustainable. Is tree farming the answer?

Color photograph of a colorful bird
Environment

How to Display a Hoatzin

The Bronx Zoo’s strange obsession with an even stranger bird.

Environment

The Tragedy of the World’s First Seed Bank

Soviet geneticist Nikolai Vavilov led an ideologically perilous campaign to rid the world of famine.

Environment

Speaking to the Future

Nuclear waste remains dangerous for millennia, so how do we keep people in the distant future away from it?

Environment

The Simple Usefulness of the Secchi Disk

A centuries-old sailor’s hack enters the ecologist’s toolkit.

Environment

The Toll of the Road

Calculating the automobile’s grisly impact on wildlife.

Environment

Stuck Inside

Space toilets and the lessons of living in closed environments.

Environment

River Gods, Lake Monsters, and the Abiding Power of Myth

How ancient (and not so ancient) cultures thought about water purity and contamination.

Photo of mattress with spraypainted warning
Environment

A Perfect Glutton, Never Ceasing

With their creeping, bloodsucking ways, bedbugs continue to mock human superiority.

Environment

Ruth Patrick’s Lovely Creatures

The groundbreaking ecologist showed that the biological diversity within a stream can be used to diagnose its health.

Environment

How Two Outsider Scientists Saw Inside Climate Change

Eunice Foote and Guy Callendar showed the warming effects of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Environment

The Sun Queen and the Skeptic: Building the World’s First Solar Houses

In the mid-20th century, colleagues-turned-rivals Maria Telkes and Hoyt Hottel engineered new ways of heating American homes.