Sublime

The Great Barrier Reef might be thought of as the ultimate “entangled bank.” Tens of millions of years of evolution have gone into its creation, with the result that even a fist-sized piece of it is unfathomably dense with life, crammed with creatures “dependent on each other in so complex a manner” that biologists will probably never fully master

the ice sheet’s surface. That summer—a record-breaker—Greenland shed almost six hundred billion tons of ice, producing enough water to fill a pool the size of California to a depth of four feet.

There is no land in all the Keys that rises more than sixteen feet above sea level, and most of it lies far below that, at an average of three or four feet.

Depending on whom you ask, you’ll get a lot of different dates for the onset of the Anthropocene. Stratigraphers, who like clarity, tend to favor the early 1950s. As the United States and the Soviet Union vied for Strangelovian supremacy, aboveground nuclear testing became routine. The tests left behind a more or less permanent marker—a spike in ra

Any news I might bring has already been brought. Thousands of scientific papers. Millions of newspaper column inches. Anyone who cares to pay attention already knows that we’ve broken Nature, and the world we know will soon end. This park, for one, is done for. This city I love, home to almost nine million, and one of humankind’s most extraordinary

In 1974, Mikhail Budyko, a prominent scientist at the Leningrad Geophysical Observatory, published a book titled Climatic Changes. Budyko laid out the dangers posed by rising CO2 levels but argued that their continued climb was inevitable: The only way to hold down emissions was to cut fossil-fuel use, and no nation was likely to do that.

Exploiting energy often involves exploiting people. In Amity and Prosperity, as elsewhere, resource extraction has long fed a sense of marginalization and disgust, both with companies that undermine the land and with the urbanites who flick on lights without considering the miners who risk their lives to power them. Today, the fracking boom has rei