Distillations magazine
Environment & Nature
Our impact on the natural and built worlds
The Thinking Plant’s Man
Jagadish Chandra Bose and the contentious search for plant intelligence.
Sesame Plots
Diaspora in twenty-one openings.
Datos ‘proxy’ que hagan justicia
La historia climática de las regiones tropicales ha sido crónicamente poco estudiada. Corregir el rumbo exigirá nuevos métodos y puntos de vista.
Proxies for Justice
The climate history of tropical regions has been chronically understudied. Correcting the record will require new methods and new perspectives.
Water and Power
Could a century-old aqueduct point the way to Los Angeles’s clean energy future?
A Tragedy with No End
Why does Garrett Hardin’s pessimistic fable haunt our collective imagination?
Everyday Monsoons
Washes and other gaps in the Sonoran Desert.
Sylvia Earle and the Call of the Deep
Adventure and tangled interests under the sea.
Rings of Fire
Arsenic cycles through racism and empire in the Americas.
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.