Distillations magazine
Environment
Our impact on the natural and built worlds
Fish Hacks
Often dismissed as a “trash fish,” the porgy anchors black maritime culture.
Forests of the Future
Modern agricultural practices are unsustainable. Is tree farming the answer?
How to Display a Hoatzin
The Bronx Zoo’s strange obsession with an even stranger bird.
The Tragedy of the World’s First Seed Bank
Soviet geneticist Nikolai Vavilov led an ideologically perilous campaign to rid the world of famine.
Speaking to the Future
Nuclear waste remains dangerous for millennia, so how do we keep people in the distant future away from it?
The Simple Usefulness of the Secchi Disk
A centuries-old sailor’s hack enters the ecologist’s toolkit.
The Toll of the Road
Calculating the automobile’s grisly impact on wildlife.
Stuck Inside
Space toilets and the lessons of living in closed environments.
River Gods, Lake Monsters, and the Abiding Power of Myth
How ancient (and not so ancient) cultures thought about water purity and contamination.
A Perfect Glutton, Never Ceasing
With their creeping, bloodsucking ways, bedbugs continue to mock human superiority.
Ruth Patrick’s Lovely Creatures
The groundbreaking ecologist showed that the biological diversity within a stream can be used to diagnose its health.
How Two Outsider Scientists Saw Inside Climate Change
Eunice Foote and Guy Callendar showed the warming effects of CO2 in the atmosphere.
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.
Philadelphia Earth Week, Fifty Years On
The successes and shortcomings of the first Earth Day in 1970 still reverberate.
Smith Griswold Sells the War against Smog
To fight air pollution, officials first had to convince Californians that carmakers were the enemy, not cars.
Poison Pill: The Mysterious Die-Off of India’s Vultures
India’s vultures have been driven to the brink of extinction in a matter of decades. Their loss threatens the well-being of the country’s human population.
Where Lies Humanity’s Salvation—Conservation or Innovation?
Scientists William Vogt and Norman Borlaug took very different approaches to feeding the world.
Harry versus the Volcano
Foul-mouthed, heavy-drinking eccentric Harry R. Truman became a folk hero for refusing to evacuate his home in the months before Mount St. Helens erupted. Where did he go once it did?