The golden age of mass disposal is now being supplanted by the age of mass recycling. Managing waste production has become an economic and ecologic imperative.

Waste Ecologies: The Landscape of Energy Cycling, Material Movements, and Resource Exchanges

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Harvard generates as much trash as a small city, with a wide spectrum of refuse from residences, dining facilities, offices, clinics, and research laboratories. How does the nation’s oldest and wealthiest university recycle and reduce waste?

Stuff by the Yard: Campus Materials Management

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The majority of urban trash is plastic or biodegradable. What is the best way to manage these materials? Businesses and environmentalists are battling it out right now.

Products, Plastics, Putrefaction, and Power

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Garbage is rich with contradictions. It is both intimate and global, ubiquitous and invisible. We generate trash in vast quantities but few of us know where it goes, or how it gets there, or what happens to it next.

Garbage: Learning to Unsee 

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Every human culture leaves some broken pottery and more, which fill the trash dumps that archaeologists study. But the trash of today is a product of industrialization.

Rags, Bones, and Plastic Bags: Trash in Industrial America

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Our ancestors hunted big game for the same reasons some of us drive fancy cars or carry a designer handbag: status. The hunters were hungry for prestige, and the meat was a bonus.

The Evolution of Big-Game Hunting: Protein, Fat, or Politics

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Brown ash trees sustain the ancestral basket-making traditions of the Wabanaki people of Maine and play a key role... Read more about Video: Protecting the Ash Tree: Wabanaki Diplomacy and Sustainability Science in Maine

Cell phones are among people’s most prized possessions. They play an important role in daily life, facilitating... Read more about Video: Unseen Connections: A Natural History of Cell Phones

Warfare is a nearly universal trait of human societies. It has influenced the evolution of human societies... Read more about Video: Understanding Warfare: An Evolutionary Approach

The ability of human groups to socially interconnect and learn from one another has allowed us to create... Read more about Video: The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter

On July 12, 1969, Ruth Davis, a young American volunteer at Dr. Jane Goodall’s research site in Gombe... Read more about Video: The Ghosts of Gombe

What impact are information and communication technologies such as the Internet and social media... Read more about Video: The Future of Happiness: How Communication Technologies Will Change Our World—Or Not