The Baffler

POUR ONE OUT for the Chinese paddlefish, its habitat destroyed by dams on the Yangtze; the cryptic treehunter, the bird’s range in the Brazilian forest cleared for sugarcane plantations; or the gastric-brooding frog, one of over a hundred native species of plants and animals that have gone extinct in Australia since the continent’s European colonization. The death of a species is a tragedy, that of a genus an unfortunate statistic, what with vertebrate genera being lopped off the tree of life at thirty-five times the extinction rate of the past million years. All this at the behest of Homo sapiens, whose single-minded drive to render all of nature into commodities causes the pH of the oceans to plummet and the CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere to soar without pause. “Bloom…

IN OCTOBER 2022, Francisco M. Lebron-Cruz was fired from his job as a turkey catcher. Then he was criminally charged. Footage had circulated online of Lebron-Cruz and eleven of his coworkers kicking, throwing, and otherwise abusing birds at Plainville Farms, a meat-processing plant in Pennsylvania whose packaging boasts that its fowl are “humanely raised.” Posing as a fellow worker, an informant for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the world’s largest and best-known animal rights organization, had smuggled a camera onto the premises and circulated the resulting tape to major news outlets. As a result of PETA’s campaign, Plainville Farms launched what it called an “aggressive internal investigation,” firing Lebron-Cruz and the other men, who were subsequently charged with 141 counts of animal cruelty. While Lebron-Cruz was convicted…

I wrote a book where I tried to make sense of my life, or where I tried to distinguish my life from my dreams, because in the moments just after waking, my dream life and my waking life were starting to feel confused. In the past few years, while I tried to write my dreams down, I would often do this as an effort not to “lose” them, but when I turned to my waking life, it felt like certain things were still becoming lost, though maybe not in the same way. For example, when I turned toward my life, I felt the weight of something behind me in almost everything I did, not just because I was beginning to move away from my dreams, but because there was a…

JUST OFF A HIKING TRAIL, not far from where Sunset Boulevard meets the sea, a fuel and an oxidant combine and combust. The underbrush is dry and dusty, and within an hour flames engulf your home. Smoke fills your kitchen and your garage. Flecks of wallpaper from your children’s bedroom float down onto a nearby parking lot. Your wedding photos melt, as does your car battery. The glass windows of your dining room shatter and temperatures reach a thousand degrees. The root cause might have been a mountaineer who burned his toilet paper at dawn, a spark at a faulty transmission line in the foothills, a discarded cigarette fanned by the Santa Anas, or, simply, arson. But it is too early to assign blame. Your attention is elsewhere. You are…

LESS THAN TWO WEEKS before the 2024 election, Joe Biden delivered a formal apology at the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona, south of Phoenix. Though Biden had traveled to dozens of countries throughout his presidential term, this trip to the reservation of the Pima and Maricopa peoples, whose ancestral roots here go back to approximately 300 BC, was his first diplomatic stop on tribal lands. In 1859, a few years after the United States acquired parts of southern Arizona from Mexico, an act of Congress relegated the Pima and Maricopa to the reservation, which comprised just 372,000 acres. At the same time, the United States took more than three million acres from the tribes. This land grab occurred in the context of Manifest Destiny in the 1800s, when the…

From the Bog to the Cloud: Dependency and Eco-Modernity in Ireland by Patrick Bresnihan and Patrick Brodie. Bristol University Press, 284 pages. 2025. ON THE BOGS of Gweedore in early July, there is a blanket of wildflowers: butter-yellow tormentil and prickly lousewort cloak the ground, alongside delicate sea campion and violet milkwort—an orchidlike flora whose buds, smaller than a fingernail, resemble the heads of birds. Chaffs and pipits hold court in the hedgerows; hares, startled by a breeze, freeze then dart below drystone walls; pairs of oystercatchers conduct their antiphonic calls across the battered rocks of Brinlack and between the sea caves of Glassagh. Walking the bog’s coastal edge, even at the height of summer, is a lonesome affair. A solitary hiker might appear on the horizon, a farmer’s quad…