In 1990, from four billion miles away, the space probe Voyager One took a photo of a barely visible pale blue dot floating in space—our planet Earth. As Carl Sagan observed in Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (Random House, 1994), all the heroes and villains, saints and sinners, warriors, and peacemakers of our global human history[...]

On February 7, 2019, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and colleagues in the U.S. House of Representatives called climate change “a direct threat to the national security of the United States,” and urged the nation to achieve “net-zero greenhouse gas emissions through a fair and just transition for all communities and workers.” House Resolution 109, known as “The Green New Deal,” outlines a plan for a 10-year mobilization to[...]

Diversity, equity, and inclusion have been thorny issues that environmental organizations have encountered since their formation in the early nineteenth century. For more than a century, these institutions were organized on exclusionary principles that resulted in cloistered, gendered, and racially homogeneous organizations. Early on[...]

Many of us have become familiar with environmental justice scholarship beginning prose as images of looming catastrophe—hungry forest fires swallowing homes, once pulsing waterways choked by drought, and emissions from a languid chemical valley settling into skies that were once vivid blue. I, like many people directly affected by one or several of these situations, wo[...]

On his first day in office in 2019, Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, closed the country’s Ministry of Labour and Employment, fulfilling his campaign pledge to the agribusiness lobby to reverse worker gains made under the Workers’ Party between 2003 and 2016. While Bolsonaro’s assault on environmental regulations and institutions rightly received glob[...]

Between 2009 and 2019, an average of 22.7 million people were displaced each year due to weather-related issues and disasters, which is nearly triple the number of people displaced by violence and political conflict during the same period, according to a report by [...]

As someone who has spent over a decade studying the climate change denial movement, many of the political tactics mainstreamed by Donald Trump and the populist right around 2015–2016 seemed familiar. Attack the experts. Launch personal attacks on opponents. Frame an email scandal to maximize political gain. Delegitimize mainstream media sources. Cast yourself as the sa[...]

When then-NASA climate scientist James Hansen delivered his landmark testimony to the U. S. Senate in 1988, declaring that human-caused global warming had likely already begun, he thrust climate change onto the national stage. Various actors with diverse, and often conflicting, approaches to climate change—from promoting policies to reduce carbon emissions to opposing [...]

The interlocked triple crisis of capitalist globalization-driven inequality, bought-and-paid-for democracies, and pervasive cultures of violence—from our most intimate relationships to the militarism of the U.S.—has for a long time been bound up with the truly wicked fourth crisis of climate chaos. And now we are experiencing the wake-up moment of the coronavirus and[...]