Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
This collection is about love, death, plants, and weird fiction. It takes its title from a Margaret Atwood story in which an adolescent girl seems to turn into a tree. It examines works by Doris Lessin... See more
Elvia Wilk • Death by Landscape
Daisy Alioto • Yearn in Review
As the American ecologist Aldo Leopold deftly put it, we need to transform the way we see ourselves, ‘from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it’.41 Thanks to forty years of Earth-system research, we have a rapidly improving scientific understanding of how the Holocene epoch – with its stable climate, ample fresh water,
... See moreKate Raworth • Doughnut Economics: The must-read book that redefines economics for a world in crisis
Much closer to realization is an effort to bring back the American chestnut tree. The tree, once common in the eastern United States, was all but wiped out by chestnut blight. (The blight, a fungal pathogen introduced in the early twentieth century, killed off nearly every chestnut in North America—an estimated four billion trees.) Researchers at t
... See moreElizabeth Kolbert • Under a White Sky
will explain how Americans in some of the most populated regions of the country have put themselves at particular risk, exposing a pattern of shortsighted policies that encouraged people to settle in vulnerable parts of the continent. It will show how decades of economic policies have favored some Americans over others, polarizing the country furth
... See moreAbrahm Lustgarten • On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America

A just civilization of eight billion, in balance with the biosphere’s production of the things we need; how would that look? What laws would create it? And how can we get there fast enough to avoid a mass extinction event?
Kim Stanley Robinson • The Ministry for the Future: A Novel
Instead, they divide the world up into “anthromes.” There is an “urban” anthrome that stretches over five hundred thousand square miles, an “irrigated cropland” anthrome (a million square miles), and a “populated forest” (four and a half million square miles). Ellis and Ramankutty count a total of eighteen “anthromes,”
Elizabeth Kolbert • The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
As with temperatures, sea levels have in the past varied dramatically. At the end of the Wisconsin, as the great ice sheets were breaking up, there were periods when they rose at the astonishing rate of a foot a decade. (It’s been proposed that one of these “meltwater pulses” inspired the account of the deluge in Genesis.) Obviously, our ancestors
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