Tag: climate change

Nothing easy about this one

Nothing easy about this one

I’m sitting in a semi-dark room, the electricity has just cut out, and there’s a slight chill in the air. I love being in MohenjoDaro (Sindh, Pakistan) in December. It’s cold at night and it’s hot during the day, unlike the summer, where there is nowhere to hide from the heat. The winter is more playful with the weather. However, living on the site isn’t play. Without being romantic about it, there’s little electricity, hardly any internet, no consistent mobile {+}

Climate Change and COVID-19: Online Learning and Experiments in Seeing the World Anew

Climate Change and COVID-19: Online Learning and Experiments in Seeing the World Anew

By Adam Fleischmann The site is easy to access. Just a short walk and I’m there, immediately confronted with two large rectangular windows. The large window up high and on the right is mostly opaque, save one dominating feature: a single, dark line scorches across its surface like a comet’s tail, bottom left to top right. The window on the left is less subdued, less ominous. Graceful curving layers of color arc to the right and skyward, almost topographical in {+}

The not-so-natural beach

The not-so-natural beach

Growing up, I always imagined the beach to be a natural place. I think it’s safe to say that this sentiment may be pretty common among many beachgoers. It’s easy to think of the beach as being somewhat “natural,” or at least close to that thing some people call “nature.” This is a short piece, so I won’t go down the what is nature!? rabbit hole for now. By natural I mean something along the lines of “not caused or {+}

Role-playing urgency: bridging climate change knowledge and action?

Role-playing urgency: bridging climate change knowledge and action?

“What does it mean to know climate change?” ask Henderson and Long in a 2015 piece for this site’s Anthropologies #21. Researchers on science education, they ask this question to explore what we can do to ensure “knowledge of climate change” becomes “knowledge for social action.” This is no small task—for educators or anthropologists. It has largely shaped my own research, the preoccupations of those with whom I work and climate politics in North America writ large. As Henderson and Long duly explain, {+}

Feelings in the field: reflections on fieldwork in murk-o

Feelings in the field: reflections on fieldwork in murk-o

My lower back is sore. There’s a tension that’s rising from the place where my neck meets my scalp, and my eyes feel baggy. I’ve just woken up, am standing in my friends’ apartment. M and F have graciously agreed to host me for umpteenth time in what feels like as many months. It’s not yet 8am. F is in the shower, M is making a weak cup of coffee. M and I are discussing what the hell it is {+}

Musings from the murky middle ground of climate science and action

Musings from the murky middle ground of climate science and action

“There are many reasons why people in our field work remotely,” one data analytics coordinator tells me. We are talking on the phone one afternoon, me from the far East Coast, him from the flat Midwest, having met each other at the Global Climate Action Summit on the West Coast. He continues. For one, it’s more sustainable. Plus it’s 2018, he says, we have the technology, so why not? This allows them to draw from a diverse and well qualified {+}

1.5ºC: The Future and Present of Anthropology in an Era of Climate Change

1.5ºC: The Future and Present of Anthropology in an Era of Climate Change

Anthro{dendum} welcomes guest blogger Adam Fleischmann Early Saturday morning, October 6, 2018, push notifications lit up phones across the eastern half of North America just as the rising sun hit the weekend coast. Messages were coming in from a time zone more than half a day away–from Incheon, South Korea. The 48th session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had just come to a close. North American climate civil society organizations—never a cohort accused of respecting normal business {+}

Repeat photography & coastal change: From notes and ideas to research method

Repeat photography & coastal change: From notes and ideas to research method

You never know when or how new research will begin. Let alone how you’re going to do it. That’s why it’s always good to take notes…and photographs. In March 2012, when I was in the middle of my doctoral work in Cabo Pulmo, I just happened to map the coastal profile of a nearby beach (known as “Los Frailes”). It’s a long, sandy stretch of beach that curves around a small bay. I walked along the edge of the waterline {+}