Articles
We’re building a guide for everyday life, where experts will educate you about our world.
Author Spotlight
Carole Crumley is the director of the Integrated History and Future of People on Earth (IHOPE) initiative and professor of anthropology (emerita) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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Helena Norberg-Hodge is the founder and director of Local Futures. She is the author of Ancient Futures (Chelsea Green, 2016) and the producer and director of the award-winning 2011 documentary “The Economics of Happiness.” Norberg-Hodge is the recipient of the Right Livelihood Award, the Goi Peace Prize, and the Arthur Morgan Award.
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Alice Belcher Tweedy (1850–1934) was an American journalist who wrote about feminism and science. “Her work paved the way for future women in journalism.” (Source: Wikipedia)
Esther Afolaranmi is an attorney, humanitarian, researcher, and writer. She is co-executive director of the Fair Start Movement.
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Josh Klemm is co-director of International Rivers.
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Kevin Fitzgerald is a veterinarian, author, educator, comedian, and television personality.
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Derek Gow is a farmer, nature conservationist, and author.
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Debra Merskin, PhD, is a professor of media studies in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon and is a co-founder of Animals and Media.
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Upton Sinclair (1878–1968) was an American Pulitzer Prize–winning writer, muckraker, and political activist. He was famous for his 1906 muckraking novel, The Jungle.
Deborah Barsky is a writing fellow for the Human Bridges project of the Independent Media Institute, a researcher at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution, and an associate professor at the Rovira i Virgili University in Tarragona, Spain, with the Open University of Catalonia (UOC). She is the author of Human Prehistory: Exploring the Past to Understand the Future.
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Guides
In a democratic society, the power to address the climate crisis lies with the people. And it begins at home, our backyards, our neighborhoods and local communities.
editorsourceareaWhen we think about effective climate action, there are many different factors and options to consider, from working within your local community to advance climate resiliency projects and urging the media to meet its climate commitments, to supporting the growth and popularity of climate fiction. Climate action can also be aided by reframing the climate crisis. Instead of seeing it only through a scientific lens but rather as a form of oppression by the wealthy elite or a matter of children’s rights, the climate crisis can be addressed on a systemic, sociopolitical level.
This guide explores various ways to approach climate action and activism, including concrete examples you can use in your own backyard and local community, plus success stories that can be emulated and reproduced wherever you are.Environmental health is crucial for public well-being as it directly impacts human health. Pollution, climate change, and habitat destruction can lead to respiratory diseases, waterborne illnesses, and other health issues. Maintaining clean air, water, and land reduces the risk of disease transmission and promotes overall health. Additionally, preserving ecosystems supports biodiversity, which contributes to food security and medicine discovery. Sustainable practices safeguard public health for current and future generations, emphasizing the vital connection between environmental and public health.
editorsourceareaThis guide explores the promise and perils of renewable energy. Can renewable energy achieve the emissions cuts we need to avoid the worst impacts of the climate crisis? Can we avoid an energy crisis if we abandon fossil fuels? What is the dark truth behind bioenergy? Is hydropower a real or false solution? Is the renewable energy transition succeeding or failing?
editorsourceareaThis guide will take you through examples of the regenerative, moneyless economy that is sometimes called “collaborative consumption.” The moneyless, sharing-based economy creates the opportunity to opt out of the mentality of disposability and the idea that “more is better,” both of which many of us are bombarded with from birth. The regenerative, moneyless economy provides an avenue for anyone to move away from the hoarding nightmare that has led to over-full garages and seldom-visited storage sheds, continent-sized trash islands, and enormous heaps of human waste. It does this by way of peer-to-peer systems set up for people to rent or borrow goods rather than buy and own them individually. It involves collaborative systems that supply people with the things they need, when they need them.
editorsourceareaWhy do some authors pretend to be someone they are not? Why do they claim experiences that they don’t have? What drives them to create texts and claim that they are ancient? By examining some examples of literary fraud from the modern era, we can gain insight not only into a fraudulent writer’s perspective, but also into readers’ expectations, publishing practices, and what kind of story a culture values.
editorsourceareaOur financial system originated in Mesopotamia, where it was designed to ensure economic stability for a community. Over time it has transformed into something much more predatory.
editorsourceareaConscious consumption, or conscious consumerism, can be accomplished in a variety of ways, such as shopping for food products that avoid harm to nonhuman animals, using green cleaning products, drinking shade-grown, fair-trade coffee and organic wine free of harmful pesticides, driving small electric vehicles over instead of gas-guzzling SUVs, and boycotting fast-fashion brands and businesses that treat workers unfairly.
This guide will help you make buying decisions that are healthier for you, your family, nonhuman animals, and the planet.
editorsourceareaWith new anthropological, biological and scientific findings, we are increasingly able to trace the outlines and fill in the blanks of our human evolutionary story. This can help us better understand the social and cultural processes that produced the world we live in now. This guide to Human Bridges explores the work of experts from the fields of human biology, human origins, and anthropology who want to contribute their individual expertise to a wider accessible body of information, and enlist in the cause to make this material a staple of education at all stages of life.
editorsourceareaThis guide explores the evolutionary origins of aesthetics in humans, otherwise known as bioaesthetics. Bioaesthetics is an interdisciplinary field that bridges biology, psychology, philosophy, and art to investigate aesthetic perception and how we perceive certain forms. Emerging research underlines the fact that our sense of beauty isn't purely cultural and has biological underpinnings.
editorsourceareaIndustrial agriculture, with its heavy reliance on chemical inputs, monoculture cropping, and intensive farming practices, poses a significant threat to the environment and wildlife. The negative impacts of industrial agriculture include wildlife habitat destruction and biodiversity loss, soil degradation, water pollution, antibiotic resistance, major greenhouse gas emissions, and animal cruelty on a massive scale. Sustainable alternatives to industrial agriculture, such as organic farming, small-scale farming, regenerative farming, and veganic farming—offer a better way forward. These sustainable farming practices not only offer a way to produce food while minimizing harm, ensuring a more resilient and sustainable food system for future generations, but can also solve existential problems like climate change.
editorsourceareaNew Additions
Ringling Bros. has stopped using animals, but hundreds of elephants still languish at circuses and zoos.
Labelled a “cretin” and “imbecile” in his lifetime, the Swiss artist Gottfried Mind had profound talents when it came to drafting the feline form and inspired later French Realists, early psychiatric theorists, and Romantic visions of the artist as outsider.
By: Kirsten Tambling
Listening to birds benefits our mental health, leading to less stress and paranoia.
By: Erika Schelby
This one-year program provides transitional employment, job training, and housing resources for people experiencing homelessness.
By: Damon Orion
Frederick L. Coolidge explains the link between numerosity and language.
By: Marjorie Hecht
As marijuana use grows, accidental intoxication in animals is becoming more common, raising questions about safety, regulation, and the need for better research.
By: Kevin Fitzgerald
Bronze Age burials at Başur Höyük predate Mesopotamian city-states, yet they lack evidence of palaces or complex governance.
For growing numbers of media companies, employee ownership offers journalistic freedom and job stability.
By: Damon Orion
By studying past societies and their relationship with their environment, archaeologists can offer unique insight into future human and planetary challenges, such as climate change and environmental pollution.
By: John Schofield
Preserving biodiversity is among the most urgent issues of our time, and it needs to be addressed regionally to succeed.
By: Jimmy Videle
Classics
A survivor’s perspective on what it was like to be on the Titanic as it sank, with detailed accountings of his and other passengers’ accounts.
Little is known about American cookbook author Susanna Shanklin Browne, but her motives for writing The Plain Sailing Cook Book are clearly stated in the preface; her inspiration was to write what she believed in 1922 was the first cookbook “successfully adapted to the needs of the person who has never before attempted to cook.” The contents include “the simpler every-day dishes that make up the staple menu of the average American family.” The book’s stated “aim is to provide ‘plain sailing’ for the wholly inexperienced mariner in culinary waters.”
The author expresses empathy for beginner cooks and explains recipes “in such a way as to leave no possible room for doubt or misunderstanding on any point.” “In preparing and arranging each recipe,” she continues, “I have tried to keep continually in mind the person who has never before cooked anything.”
“I have tried to leave nothing to the imagination, nothing to be guessed at, nothing to be decided from previous experience. In a word, I have tried to do as I would be done by, if I were the user of the book instead of the author,” she concludes.
Note: A product of its time, The Plain Sailing Cook Book assumes the reader is “the average housewife” cooking for two. But recipes may be multiplied for larger families, and beginner cooks of all genders and marital statuses will benefit from these basic lessons in cooking.In this memoir, Frederick Douglass chronicles life as an enslaved boy in the American South, his eventual escape, and his new beginnings as a free man and abolitionist.
Note: This historical memoir may include outdated and offensive language.
From Wikisource:
- “Ten Days in a Mad-House is a book written by newspaper reporter Nellie Bly and published by Norman Munro in New York City in 1887. The book comprised Blyʼs reportage for the New York World while on an undercover assignment in which she feigned insanity to investigate reports of brutality and neglect at the Womenʼs Lunatic Asylum on Blackwellʼs Island.”
By: Nellie Bly
“The Shame of the Cities is a book written by American author Lincoln Steffens. Published in 1904, it is a collection of articles which Steffens had written for McClure’s Magazine. It reports on the workings of corrupt political machines in several major cities in the United States, along with a few efforts to combat them. It is considered one of several early major pieces of muckraking journalism, but Steffens later claimed that the work made him ‘the first muckraker.’” (Source: Wikipedia)
By: Lincoln Steffens
This article on "the woman question" of the right for American women* to vote appeared in Popular Science Monthly, Volume 49, in June 1896. Two months later, Popular Science Monthly's editors attacked Tweedy's argument in an Editor's Table section titled "Women and Politics," reproduced below for historical context depicting the attitude of most men (and some women) of Tweedy's time:
- "The Monthly has lately given place to two articles on the subject of the demand which is now being made by some women on behalf of their sex to be allowed to participate in political life on a footing of perfect equality with men. One of our contributors [George F. Talbot, 'The Political Rights and Duties of Women'] has tried to show cause why the demand should not be granted, taking the ground that the change would be injurious to society as a whole and particularly injurious to the female sex. The other [Tweedy, below] treats the arguments of the first with scorn, and, if we are not mistaken, betrays not a little of that 'antagonism of the sexes' which nevertheless she declares to be 'unnatural and vicious.' The question is one which ought to be discussed with complete dispassionateness; and we think that on this score there was no fault to find with the earlier of the two contributions, that by Mr. George F. Talbot, in our May number."
The editors go on to dismiss Tweedy's argument because "As long as men alone do the voting, they are supposed to represent the non-voting sex. Every man has or has had a mother, most have one or more sisters, and a very large proportion have wives. Every man's vote, therefore, … ought to express his consciousness of and respect for the family tie." They continue, "What is mainly needed, in our opinion, is the deepening of the sense of trusteeship in men." Nevertheless, the "women agitators," described below by Tweedy, fought on until women won the right to vote with the 1920 passage of the 19th Amendment.
✲ It should be noted that the public debate at the time often considered the voting rights of only white women. While women gained the vote in 1920 with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, it was not until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that the right to vote for Black women, Indigenous women, and women of color was guaranteed.By: Alice B. Tweedy
This 1847 memoir was written by prominent activist and writer William Wells Brown to support the abolitionist movement. It chronicles Brown’s cruel treatment as an enslaved man, the horrors that he witnessed, and his multiple escape attempts for freedom.
Note: This book is part of a historical collection and may include offensive language.
The famous novel about government and business corruption in the early 20th century by muckraker author Upton Sinclair.
From Wikisource:
- “The Jungle is a 1906 novel written by author and socialist journalist Upton Sinclair. It was written about the corruption of the American meatpacking industry during the early 20th century. The novel depicts in harsh tones the poverty, absence of social programs, unpleasant living and working conditions, and hopelessness prevalent among the ‘have-nots,’ which is contrasted with the deeply rooted corruption on the part of the ‘haves.’”
By: Upton Sinclair
This article on the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (associated with the movement of German idealism) appeared in the Philosophical Review, Volume 16, pp. 488-505, in 1907.
Ellen Bliss Talbot was a professor of philosophy at Mount Holyoke College from 1898 to 1932. From Wikisource:
“According to Dorothy Rogers and Therese B. Dykeman… ‘[Talbot] had a successful academic career, chairing Mount Holyoke’s philosophy department for thirty-two years and teaching part-time for several years after retirement. She published just three books, all on Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1898, 1899, 1906), in addition to her considerable number of articles in the Philosophical Review, Mind, and the American Journal of Psychology. Her commitment to women’s education at Mount Holyoke was unwavering, helping to ensure that the philosophy curriculum met the expectations of her fellow academicians as philosophy established itself as a profession.’ From ‘Introduction: Women in the American Philosophical Tradition 1800–1930,’ in Hypatia 19:2 (Spring 2004): viii-xxxiv.”
From Wikipedia:
- “Woman in the Nineteenth Century is a book by American journalist, editor, and women’s rights advocate Margaret Fuller. Originally published in July 1843 in The Dial magazine as ‘The Great Lawsuit. Man versus Men. Woman versus Women,’ it was later expanded and republished in book form in 1845.”
- “The basis for Fuller’s essay is the idea that man will rightfully inherit the earth when he becomes an elevated being, understanding of divine love. There have been periods in time when the world was more awake to this love, but people are sleeping now; however, everyone has the power to become enlightened. Man cannot now find perfection because he is still burdened with selfish desires, but Fuller is optimistic and says that we are on the verge of a new awakening. She claims that in the past man, like Orpheus for Eurydice, has always called out for woman, but soon will come the time when women will call for men, when they will be equals and share divine love.”
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