Atmos

Climate and Culture
Volume 11 Micro/Macro
Volume 10 Afterlife
Volume 09 Kinship
Volume 08 Rhythm
Volume 07 Prism
Volume 06 Beyond
Volume 05 Hive
Volume 04 Cascade
Volume 03 Flourish/
Collapse
Volume 02 Latitude
Volume 01 Neo-Natural

In This Issue

Introducing Flourish/Collapse
A first look at Atmos, Volume 03: a journey along the axis of abundance and absence, proliferation and putrescence, life and death—and the places where these forces meet. Read Article
Is Anybody Out There?
In a new frontier called space archeology, astronomers search the cosmos for remnants of lost life. Abraham Loeb, the man who coined the phrase and leads the astronomy department at Harvard University, wants to know: What can we learn from the collapse of other civilizations? Read Article
Gut Check
Just as conservationists are working to wrap their minds around the myriad effects of wide-scale biodiversity loss, we are only just beginning to understand the damage that has been done to our own internal ecosystems. Could the solutions be the same for both? Read Article
The Diver: Sylvia Earle
As part of our Stewards of the Wild portfolio featuring individuals on the frontlines of conservation, Parley for the Oceans founder Cyrill Gutsch spoke with marine biologist and ocean explorer Sylvia Earle on conservation, discovery, and just how connected we are to the sensitive sea below us. Read Article
The DNA Bank: The Frozen Ark
It’s estimated that dozens of species of plants and animals are experiencing extinction every day. But biobanks, repositories for the DNA and cells of endangered or near-extinct species, are working to save them. For our latest issue, writer Jennifer O’Mahony interviews professor Mike Bruford, who runs the UK-based Frozen Ark and CryoArks, on how freezer networks could revive the biodiversity slipping through our grasp. Read Article
The Icebox: Svalbard Global Seed Vault
Located 1,300 kilometers beyond the Arctic Circle, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a secure seed storage facility that acts as a food bank for crops that are dying out due to intensive agriculture and unpredictable weather patterns. For our latest issue, writer Jennifer O’Mahony interviewed its manager Grethe Helene Evjen on its history and purpose—and how climate change is proving its not as failsafe as we think. Read Article
The Forestkeeper: Dr. Akira Miyawaki
Next in our Stewards of the Wild portfolio featuring individuals on the frontlines of conservation comes one of Japan’s senior and foremost experts in botany and forest ecology: Dr. Akira Miyawaki. Read Article
The Riverwatcher: Salatou Sambou
As part of our Stewards of the Wild portfolio featuring individuals on the frontlines of conservation, Atmos speaks with Kawawana conservationist Salatou Sambou who, for years, has worked to revive traditional fishing practices in the Mangagoulack communities and patrolled southern Senegalese waters to ensure that regulations on where and how fishing takes place are being respected—and, ultimately, to save the area from destitution. Read Article
The Sanctuary: Ol Pejeta Conservancy
At Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya, amidst an ecosystem of other endangered species, northern white rhinos Najin and Fatu have become the last hope for their kind—and a symbol for the future of conservation. Atmos interviews Professor Hildebrandt, head of the reproduction management department at Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research, who leads a team of scientists who announced in 2019 that they had successfully created two viable northern white rhino embryos using in vitro technology and sperm from long-dead males. Read Article
Living Like A Death Doula
While death might be a subject many prefer not to dwell on, Alua Arthur has made it the focal point of her life’s work as a death doula. Her organization Going with Grace provides end-of-life care to help individuals answer the question: What must I do to be at peace with myself so that I may die gracefully? Here, she reflects on her journey to doula-dom, how to live an authentic life, and what it means to have a beautiful death. Read Article
The Amazon Is A Woman
No one understands the violence being committed against the Amazon Rainforest like the Indigenous women who call it home. With deforestation rates at an all-time high under a tyrannical right-wing regime, the women of the forest are fighting for their lives to save the most biodiverse place on Earth. Read Article

Fierce Life: Maria do Socorro Silva

Read Article
Amazon activist Maria do Socorro Silva in the forest by Liliana Merizalde Amazon activist Maria do Socorro Silva in the forest by Liliana Merizalde
Reaping and Sewing
In fashion, who is reaping the harvest and at what cost? What kind of future is being planted and, more importantly, for whom? The Conscious Closet author Elizabeth L. Cline asks the tough questions about a field in frenzy, while looking to those who are sowing the seeds of change. Read Article
Two Futures
In this excerpt from their new book, The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis, Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac paint two portraits of the future: one in which we fail to meet the targets of the Paris Agreement (which they helped design) and another in which we succeed in moving to a regenerative, carbon-neutral world. Read Article
Sweet Poison
For Flourish/Collapse, Stefanie Moshammer submitted a series of images that illuminate the many mirrors that exist between growth and decay in nature—and the illusory line that separates human consumption from its impact on the environment. Here, she offers a side-by-side of what it looks like when nature (including humanity) trends upwards and when, often by our own design, it falters. Read Article
Holy Water
Growing up, photographer Ashish Shah saw the Ganges River as a giver of life. But the consequences of human and industrial pollution—and the Kedarnath floods of 2013—would eventually change his perception of the holy symbol and teach him to confront its dualities. For Flourish/Collapse, Shah offers a portrait of life, celebration, and death along the Ganges. Read Article
Metamorphosis
When asked to interpret the theme of our latest issue, Flourish/Collapse, through his own lens, photographer Gareth McConnell turned to butterflies as symbols of hope and renewal, but also darker forces, like destruction and death. Their intricacies led him to their metamorphosis and how, ultimately, transformation is a form of salvation—present in every one of us. Read Article
Hunger Of The Pines
For our latest issue, photographer Derek Henderson captures an evergreen invasion of wilding pines in the MacKenzie Basin of the South Island of New Zealand. Though native to North America, the unruly conifers were introduced to New Zealand in 1880. Millions of dollars are spent on controlling their spread each year as they threaten 210,000 hectares of public land administered by the Department of Conservation. Through Henderson’s lens, however, they’re towering examples that: as in life, nature is complicated. Read Article
Inheritance
For our latest issue, photographer Pieter Hugo sought to answer two questions: what we are and why we exist. Through his lens, there’s perhaps no better generation who exemplifies this than today’s youth—those who are redefining what it means to be a young person with values and whose future depends on the welfare of the planet they’re set to inherit. Read Article
Out Of Time
The Atacama Desert is one of the driest places in the world. With its clear skies and vast landscapes, it sits still atop the northern half of Chile—but, as photographer Jess Gough captured for our latest issue, it’s an extreme, surreal ecosystem brimming with life and movement. Read Article
Climate Control
Tomatoes, cucumbers, paprika, roses, potted plants… The ecosystems found within Iceland’s geothermal greenhouses are vast—supporting the growth of a variety of different produce—and situated in the last ecological community that comes to mind: the middle of a volcanic landscape. For our latest issue, photographer Jeremy Everett traveled to the Northern hemisphere to capture an array of life, and all its juxtapositions, thriving by raging heat from the earth below it. Read Article
Hooked Up To The Morphine Gun
After being named poet laureate of the United Kingdom last year, Simon Armitage announced a new prize for poetry about the environment, citing the climate crisis as an inescapable presence in his life. Here, Armitage paints a portrait of collapse on a more intimate scale with an exclusive new poem for Atmos. Read Article