Wangari Maathai has always had an affinity for trees. As a child, she learned from her grandmother that a large fig tree near her family home in central Kenya was sacred and not to be disturbed. She ...

“Imagining the impossible is what people have been doing in the struggle for liberation,” says academic and activist Ruthie Wilson Gilmore in a conversation about her latest book. For more than 30 ...

The little city of Hazen, North Dakota, population 2,300, is the kind of town where farming and ranching families often have a second income from a job at a power plant or a coal mine. As a teenager, ...

Recently, I wrote a piece about a real-life Rosie the Riveter and what she taught me about women during World War II. They were capable and confident, I learned, and I was surprised. Because I had ...

As a new, saner administration sets up shop in Washington, D.C., there are plenty of policy initiatives this country desperately needs. Beyond a national plan for the COVID-19 pandemic, progressives ...

The city of Portland, Oregon, prides itself on being ahead of the curve. In 1993, it became the first U.S. city to adopt a climate action plan, which now calls for cutting carbon emissions by 50% by ...

In 1992, a Canadian ecologist named William Rees coined the term “ecological footprint,” a measurement of how much any entity was impacting the planet’s ecology. A decade later, British Petroleum ...

Sizeism is everywhere in our culture, from the workplace to the playground. It’s time to change that. Fat-shaming is stitched into the fabric of American culture. In fact, it’s so embedded in our ...

Tony Hernandez remembers playing as a child on the vacant lots in the Dudley Street neighborhood of Boston. In the 1980s, white flight and disinvestment had so devastated this neighborhood that more ...

Joel Salatin is no simple farmer. When he speaks, he at times takes on the air of a Southern preacher, philosopher, heretic, businessman, activist, or ecological engineer. Since Michael Pollan’s book ...

In 1902, British skater Madge Syers became the first woman to compete at the World Figure Skating Championships. At the time, there were no rules against women entering. Syers came in second to ...

Today, I am thinking about love. A fraught, confusing, full-of-potential kind of love. It’s like this: I’m writing to you on the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr., a Black man who was murdered ...