States of Plague

States of Plague: States of Plague examines Albert Camus’s novel as a palimpsest of  pandemic life, an uncannily relevant account of the psychology and politics of a public health crisis. As one of the most discussed books of the COVID-19 crisis, Albert Camus’s classic novel The Plague has become a new kind of literary touchstone. Surrounded by terror and uncertainty, often separated from loved ones or unable to travel, readers sought answers within the pages of Camus’s 1947 tale about an Algerian city gripped by an epidemic. Many found in it a story about their own lives—a book to shed light on a global health crisis. In thirteen linked chapters told in alternating voices, Alice Kaplan and Laura Marris hold the past and present of The Plague in conversation, discovering how the novel has reached people in their current moment.  Kaplan’s chapters explore the book’s tangled and vivid history, while Marris’s are drawn to the ecology of landscape and language. Through these pages, they find that their sense of Camus evolves under the force of a new reality, alongside the pressures of illness, recovery, concern, and care in their own lives. Along the way, Kaplan and Marris examine how the novel’s original allegory might resonate for a new generation of readers who have experienced a global pandemic.  They describe how they learned to contemplate the skies of a plague spring, to examine the body politic and%...

How reframing recycling systems can protect people and the planet

How reframing recycling systems can protect people and the planet
A new program would transfer recycling responsibilities to the companies that use these materials for their products and packaging.

Published November 14, 2022 at 06:00PM
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How healthy is the Upper Rio Grande?

How healthy is the Upper Rio Grande?
Water overuse, infrastructure, changes in the amount of rainfall, increased temperatures, and the climate crisis are decreasing the amount of water that has historically flowed in the Rio Grande.

Published November 10, 2022 at 06:00PM
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The Amazon in crisis: Forest loss threatens the region and the planet

The Amazon in crisis: Forest loss threatens the region and the planet


Published November 07, 2022 at 06:00PM
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What to expect from this year’s international climate talks

What to expect from this year’s international climate talks
Ambitions and promises need to translate into action, and at this COP, we will be looking for moments where we can set the stage to begin the real work and challenges around decarbonization.

Published November 01, 2022 at 07:00PM
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The Doctor Who Wasn’t There

The Doctor Who Wasn’t There: This gripping history shows how the electronic devices we use to access care influence the kind of care we receive.The Doctor Who Wasn’t There traces the long arc of enthusiasm for—and skepticism of—electronic media in health and medicine. Over the past century, a series of new technologies promised to democratize access to healthcare. From the humble telephone to the connected smartphone, from FM radio to wireless wearables, from cable television to the “electronic brains” of networked mainframe computers: each new platform has promised a radical reformation of the healthcare landscape. With equal attention to the history of technology, the history of medicine, and the politics and economies of American healthcare, physician and historian Jeremy A. Greene explores the role that electronic media play, for better and for worse, in the past, present, and future of our health. Today’s telehealth devices are far more sophisticated than the hook-and-ringer telephones of the 1920s, the radios that broadcasted health data in the 1940s, the closed-circuit televisions that enabled telemedicine in the 1950s, or the online systems that created electronic medical records in the 1960s. But the ethical, economic, and logistical concerns they raise are prefigured in the past, as are the gaps between what was promised and what was delivered. Each of these platforms also produced subtle transformations in health and healthcare that we have learned to forget,...

Aquaculture is on the rise, and so are efforts to improve it

Aquaculture is on the rise, and so are efforts to improve it
WWF works with large retailers, producers, and associations to secure commitments to support conversion-free farmed seafood.

Published October 31, 2022 at 07:00PM
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Nearly 1.8 million acres of grassland destroyed in US and Canada in 2020

Nearly 1.8 million acres of grassland destroyed in US and Canada in 2020
Since 2016, a total of almost 10 million acres have been plowed across the region, which is an area nearly as large as New Jersey, Connecticut, and Rhode Island combined.

Published October 23, 2022 at 07:00PM
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How business can help scale ocean conservation

How business can help scale ocean conservation
To protect our rapidly changing seas—and those who depend on them—we need to tackle challenges in a systematic way and focus on holistic improvements: place-based approaches.

Published October 10, 2022 at 07:00PM
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KAZA's first-ever coordinated aerial elephant survey launched

KAZA's first-ever coordinated aerial elephant survey launched
Launched in northwest Zimbabwe in August, the survey is undertaken by the five KAZA partner countries—Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe—and with support from WWF and other partners.

Published October 05, 2022 at 07:00PM
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OECMs: A new paradigm for area-based conservation

OECMs: A new paradigm for area-based conservation
Background for the 2022 Fuller Symposium.

Published October 05, 2022 at 07:00PM
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Critically endangered Arctic foxes successfully breed in Finland

Critically endangered Arctic foxes successfully breed in Finland
This is the first time in over 25 years the Arctic fox has successfully bred in Finland. In recent years, more Arctic fox observations have been made at the feeding stations maintained.

Published October 03, 2022 at 07:00PM
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Why tracing seafood from sea to plate is the next frontier in sustainability

Why tracing seafood from sea to plate is the next frontier in sustainability
Seafood is one of the most frequently traded commodities on earth, so it’s essential that fishing is well-regulated around the world. But regulations must be complied with to be effective.

Published September 25, 2022 at 07:00PM
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How gorilla tourism can benefit wildlife and people

How gorilla tourism can benefit wildlife and people
Although mountain gorillas are still an endangered species, there are signs of hope for their recovery. And gorilla tourism also benefits local communities.

Published September 21, 2022 at 07:00PM
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What to expect for Climate Week 2022

What to expect for Climate Week 2022
Climate Week is finally back at full force this year. Here's what I'm looking for during this moment when the bright lights of the big city of New York are trained squarely on the climate crisis.

Published September 18, 2022 at 07:00PM
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Pleasure and Panic

Pleasure and Panic: Offers a range of perspectives on the debate about liberalizing drug and alcohol laws. Booze, dope, smokes, and weed. Mind-altering, mood-changing substances have been part of human society for millennia. The history of drugs and alcohol is infused with what we understand as their proper and improper use. Pleasure and Panic reveals how cultural fears and social, political, and economic disparities have always been deeply embedded in attitudes about drugs and alcohol. Long before John Lennon testified at Canada’s Le Dain Commission in favor of marijuana decriminalization, social movements existed to challenge the view that consumption of mind-altering substances, especially by young people, posed a danger to society. The contributors to this collection explore how drugs and alcohol intersect with diverse histories, including gender, medicine, popular culture, and business.

Osiris, Volume 37

Osiris, Volume 37: Highlights the importance of translation for the global exchange of medical theories, practices, and materials in the premodern period. This volume of Osiris turns the analytical lens of translation onto medical knowledge and practices across the premodern world. Understandings of the human body, and of diseases and their cures, were influenced by a range of religious, cultural, environmental, and intellectual factors. As a result, complex systems of translation emerged as people crossed linguistic and territorial boundaries to share not only theories and concepts, but also materials, such as drugs, amulets, and surgical tools. The studies here reveal how instances of translation helped to shape and, in some cases, reimagine these ideas and objects to fit within local frameworks of medical belief.Translating Medicine across Premodern Worlds features case studies located in geographically and temporally diverse contexts, including ninth-century Baghdad, sixteenth-century Seville, seventeenth-century Cartagena, and nineteenth-century Bengal. Throughout, the contributors explore common themes and divergent experiences associated with a variety of historical endeavors to “translate” knowledge about health and the body across languages, practices, and media. By deconstructing traditional narratives and de-emphasizing well-worn dichotomies, this volume ultimately offers a fresh and innovative approach to histories of knowledge.

Limits of the Numerical

Limits of the Numerical: This collection examines the uses of quantification in climate science, higher education, and health.   Numbers are both controlling and fragile. They drive public policy, figuring into everything from college rankings to vaccine efficacy rates. At the same time, they are frequent objects of obfuscation, manipulation, or outright denial. This timely collection by a diverse group of humanists and social scientists challenges undue reverence or skepticism toward quantification and offers new ideas about how to harmonize quantitative with qualitative forms of knowledge.    Limits of the Numerical focuses on quantification in several contexts: climate change; university teaching and research; and health, medicine, and well-being more broadly. This volume shows the many ways that qualitative and quantitative approaches can productively interact—how the limits of the numerical can be overcome through equitable partnerships with historical, institutional, and philosophical analysis. The authors show that we can use numbers to hold the powerful to account, but only when those numbers are themselves democratically accountable.

How the Clinic Made Gender

How the Clinic Made Gender: An eye-opening exploration of the medical origins of gender in modern US history.  Today, a world without “gender” is hard to imagine. Gender is at the center of contentious political and social debates, shapes policy decisions, and informs our everyday lives. Its formulation, however, is lesser known: Gender was first used in clinical practice. This book tells the story of the invention of gender in American medicine, detailing how it was shaped by mid-twentieth-century American notions of culture, personality, and social engineering.  Sandra Eder shows how the concept of gender transformed from a pragmatic tool in the sex assignment of children with intersex traits in the 1950s to an essential category in clinics for transgender individuals in the 1960s. Following gender outside the clinic, she reconstructs the variable ways feminists integrated gender into their theories and practices in the 1970s. The process by which ideas about gender became medicalized, enforced, and popularized was messy, and the route by which gender came to be understood and applied through the treatment of patients with intersex traits was fraught and contested. In historicizing the emergence of the sex/gender binary, Eder reveals the role of medical practice in developing a transformative idea and the interdependence between practice and wider social norms that inform the attitudes of physicians and researchers. She shows that ideas like gender can take on a life of their own and%...

Limits of the Numerical

Limits of the Numerical: This collection examines the uses of quantification in climate science, higher education, and health.   Numbers are both controlling and fragile. They drive public policy, figuring into everything from college rankings to vaccine efficacy rates. At the same time, they are frequent objects of obfuscation, manipulation, or outright denial. This timely collection by a diverse group of humanists and social scientists challenges undue reverence or skepticism toward quantification and offers new ideas about how to harmonize quantitative with qualitative forms of knowledge.    Limits of the Numerical focuses on quantification in several contexts: climate change; university teaching and research; and health, medicine, and well-being more broadly. This volume shows the many ways that qualitative and quantitative approaches can productively interact—how the limits of the numerical can be overcome through equitable partnerships with historical, institutional, and philosophical analysis. The authors show that we can use numbers to hold the powerful to account, but only when those numbers are themselves democratically accountable.