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Hi,
I’m Sam Matey, and I really, really enjoy writing The Weekly Anthropocene. This newsletter has been a labor of love for me since October 2017 (here’s the old archive). There’s a huge amount of incredible, fascinating work being done around the world to try to build a good Anthropocene for humanity and its biosphere, and I’d like to write about a lot more of it!
Over the last few months, I’ve started putting some of my articles behind a paywall. If you buy a paid subscription, you can read them all (I think they’re some of my best work!) and also support more The Weekly Anthropocene journalism! Here they are:
Paid Subscriber Articles (i.e. continuing past a paywall)!
Morocco is a country on the way up
In the 1000s and 1100s, the lands that are now Morocco were one of the richest and most technologically advanced parts of human civilization. In the 1170s, the Almohad capital of Fes (“the Athens of Africa”) may have briefly been the most populous city in the world
Ashoka the Great Was, In Fact, Pretty Great
Living in an age of extraordinary technological and socioeconomic advances, it’s easy to construct a mental model of history as a teleological “Whig” progression from better to worse, with the past few millennia as mere “Dark Age” forerunners of Modernity, the surge of
The Weekly Anthropocene Reviews: Princess Mononoke
This newsletter aims to discuss and support a synthesis of human development and wildlife conservation; basically the idea that our civilization is capable of providing a good life for everyone without destroying the biosphere or causing a mass extinction, and that we should do so. These ideas (sometimes called “
Book Review: A City on Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith
A book with the title A City on Mars sounds like it should be a classic Golden Age of Science Fiction-style paean to space settlement, and the authors (the polymathic power couple Kelly and Zach Weinersmith) acknowledge that that’s exactly what they originally hoped to write. However, after copious research, they ended a book that firmly convinced me that there will not, in fact, be a city on Mars in this writer’s lifetime (barring serious life extension technology, which I’m still hoping for). That sounds sad, but
Interview: Dr. Christine Wilkinson, Carnivore Ecologist
Dr. Christine Wilkinson is a conservation biologist, carnivore ecologist, and National Geographic Explorer, currently researching human-carnivore coexistence in the Lake Nakuru area of Kenya and in the urban spaces of California. She posts on TikTok as
Book Review: Indigenous Continent by Pekka Hämäläinen
I hadn’t planned to write a review of Indigenous Continent, but I saw a copy at my local library, and then I was inexorably going to do so. The book demanded my attention, then successfully held it. A one-volume history of the Indigenous nations of North America, this
Interview: Sarah Soteroff of Too Good To Go
Sarah Soteroff is a spokesperson for Too Good To Go, a rapidly growing app service that connects hungry consumers to restaurants and stores with unsold food that would otherwise go to waste. A lightly edited transcript of this exclusive interview follows. This writer’s questions and remarks are in
Furthermore, I’ve been trying to up the pace to three articles a week, but I may need to scale back down to one or two articles per week in the near future to focus on other work. The limiting factor on my writing is time, and the limiting factor on my time is the need to make money. More paid subscribers would make this sustainable! If you’d like to make possible more of The Weekly Anthropocene’s data-driven, solutions-focused independent journalism (and to read all of the articles above in their entirety!), please become a paid subscriber!
Thank you so much for reading,
Sam
Speaking as a paid subscriber, I think it's a good thing to support this valuable newsletter.