The Burning Earth is Yale history professor Sunil Amrith’s fifth book, and his first that focuses his academic eye on the climate crisis.
“As a citizen and then as a parent,” he says, “the climate crisis just became unavoidable in my mind.”
His first books, notably Crossing the Bay of Bengal and Unruly Waters, focused on the history of migration and ecology in Southeast Asia. The Burning Earth takes a global tack, covering the history of the climate crisis from hundreds of years ago, when the Industrial Revolution ignited the mass commodification of natural resources, to now, with the elimination of CFCs and recent climate tech. He sees history through the lens of human needs and desires, and specifically, the luxurious wants of a small slice of elites.
Sunil Amrith is the Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History at Yale University, with a secondary appointment as Professor at the Yale School of the Environment.
“The desires of a small elite, and the violent pursuit of inequality through empire, has turbocharged our impact on the planet,” Amrith says. As he writes in the prologue:
I can no longer separate the crisis of life on Earth from our concerns with justice and human freedom that inspired me to become a historian in the first place.
What is the main focus of the book?
The core question in The Burning Earth is really: How much is human freedom dependent on the destruction of our planet? I do not think that human flourishing necessitates the sheer and irreparable harm that we have done to our planet. I think a lot of that has been driven more by the desires and the consumption of a small elite amongst human beings.
You write about need, want and desire and how it relates to the climate crisis. How have those base human traits contributed to the climate breakdown?
I see two long-term paths towards our climate crisis. One is the story of human need. Food and shelter account for a significant part of our impact on the planet — the search for food and shelter, both of which are still very unequally accessed. And that is a long-term story, that the search for food contributes not just to greenhouse gas emissions, but overwhelmingly to biodiversity loss.
The second story we need to tell is that for at least 500 years, the desires of a small elite, and the violent pursuit of inequality through empire, has turbocharged our impact on the planet. It is the vast and disproportionate resources consumed by those with wealth and power in the world. Their identity has changed over time. For several hundred years, it was mostly Northern Europeans. And now that group of people is certainly much more distributed across the world.
You write in the book that elites looked at groups of people who are close to nature as being less human.
I think one of the questions we ask ourselves as we face this climate breakdown is, how did we ever come to believe that the health of the planet didn’t matter to all of us? And yet I think that there has been a period in global history where proportions of people around the world have acted as if it wasn’t true – that we could disregard the health of rivers and forests and simply consume at any rate we chose. That is a mentality that I do also associate with a mentality that imposes a hierarchy on other human beings.
If you look at, for example, the early colonization of the Americas, the language that the Iberian colonizers used to talk about Indigenous people is very often: they are close to nature. They are not fully human like we are. That legitimizes plunder and exploitation and violence, but it also legitimizes mass deforestation and extraction.
Was there any way, historically, to stop the inevitable march towards our climate crisis?
The motivations that are driving people to want to expand their lifespans, to improve the conditions and the security with which their families live – I never want to lose sight of those kinds of baseline human aspirations.
There are deep human dreams which you can see shared across cultures to simply want one’s descendants to have a better life, to want one’s family to continue. I do see that there is a progression in human beings’ ability and power to mold their surroundings, to make those surroundings more hospitable or more habitable for the human societies.
Then there are parts of the story which I think weren’t inevitable. There was nothing ordained about plantation production, for example, which is a very particular kind of cultivation which has to do with exploiting nature as quickly as possible for rapid gain. I think that is a very specific kind of innovation.
I think there are technologies that could have had multiple different kinds of uses. And what we’ve tended to see is that their use has been towards maximum extraction.
You write about silver mining and sugar plantations. How were these some of the earliest environmental catastrophes?
There’s no question that silver mining in the Americas was an environmental catastrophe, and we now have archaeological and genetic evidence that suggests just what a catastrophic impact that had on the health of workers. It was the use of mercury in extracting silver that was so devastating to both the landscape and above all to people’s health. That silver is at the root of what becomes a global economy.
One could probably make the argument that no single crop has caused greater harm than sugar both to human beings and to nature. Sugar began as a very, very rare luxury. It was treated as one of the fine spices in medieval Europe. And it’s only when you start to get large-scale plantation production combined with the social and economic transformations of early modern Europe that it becomes an item of mass consumption.
What effect did large scale steel and iron production have?
It’s largely a 19th century story. The age of industrialization coincides exactly with the fossil fuel era, because if we begin with coal in the second half of the 18th century, we start to see widespread use of coal first in England, then in northwestern Europe and in North America.
I think what changed more than anything else is scale – both the scale of resources that are needed for factory production, and the scale of impact that can be had. I think the story of the railroads is a classic example of this. One of my favorite works of environmental history is Bill Cronin’s book Changes in the Land, which shows how the city of Chicago really reshapes the entire American Midwest. And it does so through the rail lines. Suddenly, Chicago’s markets and exchanges become accessible. And that hastens the destruction of forests, that hastens the expansion of wheat production and monocrop production. And I think we see similar stories all over the world, which is what happens is that as people can travel further, as goods can travel further, you start to get global markets for commodities. And that pushes forward the commodification of nature, the idea that this is not a forest, this is timber, that shift in mentality.
You describe how the “war machine” is a mechanism of climate destruction.
That is the part of the book that was the biggest surprise to me. I did not expect that I would conclude that of all the forces driving climate breakdown, warfare is possibly number one. I think the two world wars came to strike me as being pivotal transformative moments, not just because of the scale of resources which went into both of those wars, but also because of the scale of destruction that those wars then made possible, culminating in atomic weapons by the end of the second world war.
Military emissions are not counted in most of our climate targets and most international contributions that have been agreed to. The best estimate we have is that military missions account for about 5% of greenhouse gas emissions, but that is a guess because we don’t know.
You write about the data project of 1957 and 1958, one of the first climate data projects. Tell me about the through line between that and the sheer amount of data we have now.
This is the International Geophysical Year, and it was this year that the Mauna Loa Observatory was set up in Hawaii, which is, to this day, sort of the gold standard that we have for measuring cumulative concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
The Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii in 2008. Ken Dewey / University of Nebraska-Lincoln School of Natural Resources
This data came during the height of the Cold War. This project is drawing in countries from both sides, drawing in countries that don’t necessarily get along. This is the data that first makes us aware that we are living through a period of unprecedented climate change.
With the acceleration the amount of data today, does it not seem to reason that more data would help our imperiled planet?
More data is undeniably important to climate scientists as they make projections and formulate their models. But more data hasn’t necessarily led to more consensus. More data has not necessarily changed the overall narrative about climate change. I think the data is essential, but I’m not sure that we’re at a point where more data is going to change more people’s minds. Those are political questions, those are cultural questions, and those are much harder to shift.
Why won’t more – and better – data change more people’s minds?
Firstly, I think in the U.S. more than anywhere else, there has been a politically motivated skepticism of that data. We know that the fossil fuel companies have been directly involved in promoting that sort of distrust all over the world. We’re in a broader populist moment of distrust of expertise. That is one reason why I think more data won’t necessarily change people’s minds.
Another is that data is complicated, and the way in which climate scientists and other earth scientists think about uncertainty doesn’t necessarily translate very smoothly into broader general consciousness.
And finally, the data is sometimes on a scale that is just unfathomable for all of us, so detached from our everyday lived experience, that I think we need more translation. And maybe that is where a creative artist, or a novelist like the great Richard Powers, have had more impact on shifting people’s awareness and consciousness perhaps than more data.
As an educator at Yale, how did researching and writing this book change what you bring to the classroom?
I’ve been teaching environmental history for about 15 years. And there are classes I’ve taught where the questions students have raised, the projects they’ve done, the conversations we’ve had in the classroom have just stayed with me. So, it’s not just what I bring to the classroom, but really what I get from the classroom that is translated directly into this book.
I think we need to bring the environment into everything, not just into environmental history, but I think we need to be thinking about these questions across our humanities curriculum. I mean, in that sense, that’s partly what I was trying to do with The Burning Earth, which was to say, let’s not separate the environmental story from perhaps more familiar stories about the rise and fall of empires, about unfree labor, about migration, about global transformations. And I think more broadly, that’s what I would love to see happen, which is a kind of weaving in of the more-than-human, the planet, the ecology into how we study literature, into how we study philosophy.
Might one of the hopes of this book be for people to look at the world around them and to realize that everything that’s made here possibly comes from a place of environmental destruction?
I would love readers of The Burning Earth to make connections between the material that I present, especially that which is most unfamiliar in their everyday lived experience. My aspiration is not to make people feel guilty. Quite the opposite. I want to give readers the impression that everything is interconnected.
This is about looking at choices with a sense of hopefulness that that means that a shift in consciousness or new forms of collective action can bring about change and perhaps even bring about change quite quickly.
As a historian, any predictions for the future?
I think we are living through a period, you know, just this decade, I think, of such unpredictable change that I think there are so many different trajectories that could lie before us, some of them terrifying, and some of them more hopeful.
The post ‘Everything Is Interconnected’: Author and History Professor Sunil Amrith on Facing the Climate Crisis appeared first on EcoWatch.
https://www.ecowatch.com/sunil-amrith-interview-burning-earth-ecowatch.html
Personal style is a dance between dualities: fashion as art and fashion as function; clothing as self-expression and clothing for our circumstances.
Style is a medium for communication and self-expression, yes. But it’s also shaped by the environments and requirements around us, from workplace dress codes to city cultures, climates, and specific occassions.
In last Saturday’s workshop, where we talked about how to remix what you already have in your closet, attendees shared a common challenge:
How do you balance your personal style expression while dressing for the various situations and environments we operate in?
“I’ve found above all else my style is highly influenced by my environment (my job, my city etc.)—sometimes it becomes about ‘fitting in’ and losing individuality”
“I find I’m too led by my day-to-day lifestyle. I WFH and so often I just don’t get dressed at all.”
“There are too many applications: workout, work, at home, formal occasion.”
Style as Identity vs. Style as Communication
It’s no wonder style and getting dressed can feel so confusing.
In the personal style world, we learn to dress for who we are on the inside. And then we see the style rules in fashion media: here’s how to dress for this season, this dress code, this city.
And in our real lives, we have real dress codes we might have to follow, whether for a workplace or a wedding.
But what if all those sides conflict?
- If my style words are “casual” or “sporty” but I’m in a workplace 40+ hours a week that requires business formal, where does that leave my personal style?
- If I love vibrant and artsy looks, but I live in a city full of neutrals, what do I wear?
It’s no surprise it feels… complicated.
Here’s my take.
We’re Not One-Dimensional — Neither is Our Style
Sometimes I want to disconnect and live in cottage in the mountains, surrounded by more trees than people. Other days I dream of having an apartment in the center of Paris where I see more people in a day than live in my hometown.
I’m light, joyful, maybe even quirky with friends. I’m ambitious, intentional, perhaps more serious in work. There are times I feel it’s best to soften and let it go; other times it feels most aligned to be unapologetically outspoken.
We are human. We’re social creatures. We’re complex and full of contradictions.
Social media has trained us to fit people into neat boxes because “niche” is what performs in the algorithm.
In real life, though, our “authentic” selves aren’t so one-dimensional.
I’m not speaking to new networking contacts the same exact way I talk to my best friend I’ve known for years. That doesn’t mean I’m pretending to be someone else. It just means I’m showing up a bit differently depending on the context.
Similarly, our personal style doesn’t have to be expressed in one singular way.
That’s what’s beautiful about fashion! We have the opportunity to express ourselves a bit differently each and every time we get dressed.
What we wear might ebb and flow with a situation, the season, or our mood. There are common threads, but differentiators too.
Three distinctly different looks can all be authentic.
For me, personal style isn’t about being setting such rigid parameters that we can no longer embrace our multi-dimensional nature.
And there’s undoubtedly the layers of privilege at work here too. Is it safe to dress in alignment with your true identity in that particular situation? Will you be taken seriously? Could there be repercussions?
There’s a lot to untangle when it comes to what we wear.
Making Our Multi-Dimensional Style Practical
As I shared in last week’s workshops, style is many layers. The four I see it through are the vibe, the shapes, the colors & textures, and our lifestyle & values.
The aesthetic reflects your vibe, mood or style adjectives.
- For example, my vibe or adjectives are feminine, structured, grounded.
The shapes are the fits, silhouettes, and proportions you love.
- I often wear outfits with a straight silhouette or tailored fit balanced with a relaxed, flowy, or drapey element.
Colors & textures include your preferred palettes, fabrics, and the way materials feel.
- I prefer wearing natural fibers when possible. I like gold jewelry, and I feel more aligned in lower contrast looks. Lighter colors for day. Sometimes darker for evening or certain events.
The lifestyle & values element is the consideration of your actual day-to-day. What situations and environments are you dressing for? What is important to you?
- I work from home so comfort is key most of the time. I value slow fashion practices — rewearing, repairing, and supporting circular practices and sustainably-minded brands.
Once you understand these layers of your style, the next step is figuring out how to apply them in real-life situations.
Applying Your Style to the Situation
In last week’s workshops, I talked about the role of outfit templates here for various situations. What is the foundational blueprint of what you might wear to your office, working from home, in a school setting, at home, running errands, and so on?
There are opportunities to bring in the layers of your personal style in these various situations, but it does require some intentionally on the outset. Otherwise, it’s easy to fall into our old patterns or copy what others around us wear. (Even subconsciously, as fashion psychologist Shakaila Forbes-Bell has shared!)
Here’s one of my work-from-home outfit templates that balances style and situational needs:
- Blouse with feminine detail: I start with the top for Zoom calls!
- Straight-leg bottoms: this could be jeans, colorful pants, or a column skirt
- Slim shoes: the general “slim” descriptor makes it versatile across seasons
- Structured bag: an option to add polish when coworking at a café
By thinking in these various layers (vibe, shapes, colors & textures, and lifestyle & values) you can build outfits that feel authentic to you while fitting the constraints of the external situation.
What About One-Off Unique Situations?
Like this Wednesday evening, I spoke on a “Sustainable Fashion in Action” panel with Chicago Climate Connect during Sustainable Fashion Week Chicago. But the panel was also taking place at the Patagonia x Worn Wear store.
So the vibe was professional meets fashion, but also kinda casual?! And we are still in the Midwest here. I have to say, this one wasn’t easy.
But here’s the step-by-step thought process that helped me balance my style, function, and a unique-to-me context.
- I picked a foundational piece: My navy wide-leg trousers were business casual without being too formal and were practical for train travel.
- And functional accessories:My old Coach bag fits everything and my chunky Veja sneakers matched the vibe I was going for so those were the picks.
- Then a piece that brought it all together:At this point I was mixing high-contrast colors (white with navy & black) and different vibes (trousers vs. sneakers). I felt like I needed a bridge for the outfit, and this navy-striped vest tied it all together.
- Finally, some final touches: Gold jewelry made the look feel more “me”, while this cap from Abbie at The Filtery made it all feel effortless.
In the end, this outfit took a lot longer to create than a typical look.
It took longer to create than my usual outfits, but it felt just right. The combination was practical, suited my style, fit the vibe of the panel, and aligned with the weather.
This panel outfit reminded me that style is what we wear to express ourselves, but it’s also a tool to help us navigate our lives. By thinking through these layers of personal style (vibe, shapes, colors, textures, and lifestyle needs) we can balance showing up authentically while honoring the nuances or navigating the constraints of a situation.
For me, that’s the real power of personal style.
One single outfit can’t tell the whole story of who we are. But personal style can be flexible, functional, and expressive of the many sides of our multi-dimensional nature.
So lately, more than asking “does this outfit perfectly express my full self?” I’ve been finding myself asking:
“Does this outfit help me show up in the way I want to? Does it say what I want it to say in this particular moment?“
The post The Many Layers of Personal Style appeared first on .
Personal style is a dance between dualities: fashion as art and fashion as function; clothing as self-expression and clothing for our circumstances.
Style is a medium for communication and self-expression, yes. But it’s also shaped by the environments and requirements around us, from workplace dress codes to city cultures, climates, and specific occassions.
In last Saturday’s workshop, where we talked about how to remix what you already have in your closet, attendees shared a common challenge:
How do you balance your personal style expression while dressing for the various situations and environments we operate in?
“I’ve found above all else my style is highly influenced by my environment (my job, my city etc.)—sometimes it becomes about ‘fitting in’ and losing individuality”
“I find I’m too led by my day-to-day lifestyle. I WFH and so often I just don’t get dressed at all.”
“There are too many applications: workout, work, at home, formal occasion.”
Style as Identity vs. Style as Communication
It’s no wonder style and getting dressed can feel so confusing.
In the personal style world, we learn to dress for who we are on the inside. And then we see the style rules in fashion media: here’s how to dress for this season, this dress code, this city.
And in our real lives, we have real dress codes we might have to follow, whether for a workplace or a wedding.
But what if all those sides conflict?
- If my style words are “casual” or “sporty” but I’m in a workplace 40+ hours a week that requires business formal, where does that leave my personal style?
- If I love vibrant and artsy looks, but I live in a city full of neutrals, what do I wear?
It’s no surprise it feels… complicated.
Here’s my take.
We’re Not One-Dimensional — Neither is Our Style
Sometimes I want to disconnect and live in cottage in the mountains, surrounded by more trees than people. Other days I dream of having an apartment in the center of Paris where I see more people in a day than live in my hometown.
I’m light, joyful, maybe even quirky with friends. I’m ambitious, intentional, perhaps more serious in work. There are times I feel it’s best to soften and let it go; other times it feels most aligned to be unapologetically outspoken.
We are human. We’re social creatures. We’re complex and full of contradictions.
Social media has trained us to fit people into neat boxes because “niche” is what performs in the algorithm.
In real life, though, our “authentic” selves aren’t so one-dimensional.
I’m not speaking to new networking contacts the same exact way I talk to my best friend I’ve known for years. That doesn’t mean I’m pretending to be someone else. It just means I’m showing up a bit differently depending on the context.
Similarly, our personal style doesn’t have to be expressed in one singular way.
That’s what’s beautiful about fashion! We have the opportunity to express ourselves a bit differently each and every time we get dressed.
What we wear might ebb and flow with a situation, the season, or our mood. There are common threads, but differentiators too.
Three distinctly different looks can all be authentic.
For me, personal style isn’t about being setting such rigid parameters that we can no longer embrace our multi-dimensional nature.
And there’s undoubtedly the layers of privilege at work here too. Is it safe to dress in alignment with your true identity in that particular situation? Will you be taken seriously? Could there be repercussions?
There’s a lot to untangle when it comes to what we wear.
Making Our Multi-Dimensional Style Practical
As I shared in last week’s workshops, style is many layers. The four I see it through are the vibe, the shapes, the colors & textures, and our lifestyle & values.
The aesthetic reflects your vibe, mood or style adjectives.
- For example, my vibe or adjectives are feminine, structured, grounded.
The shapes are the fits, silhouettes, and proportions you love.
- I often wear outfits with a straight silhouette or tailored fit balanced with a relaxed, flowy, or drapey element.
Colors & textures include your preferred palettes, fabrics, and the way materials feel.
- I prefer wearing natural fibers when possible. I like gold jewelry, and I feel more aligned in lower contrast looks. Lighter colors for day. Sometimes darker for evening or certain events.
The lifestyle & values element is the consideration of your actual day-to-day. What situations and environments are you dressing for? What is important to you?
- I work from home so comfort is key most of the time. I value slow fashion practices — rewearing, repairing, and supporting circular practices and sustainably-minded brands.
Once you understand these layers of your style, the next step is figuring out how to apply them in real-life situations.
Applying Your Style to the Situation
In last week’s workshops, I talked about the role of outfit templates here for various situations. What is the foundational blueprint of what you might wear to your office, working from home, in a school setting, at home, running errands, and so on?
There are opportunities to bring in the layers of your personal style in these various situations, but it does require some intentionally on the outset. Otherwise, it’s easy to fall into our old patterns or copy what others around us wear. (Even subconsciously, as fashion psychologist Shakaila Forbes-Bell has shared!)
Here’s one of my work-from-home outfit templates that balances style and situational needs:
- Blouse with feminine detail: I start with the top for Zoom calls!
- Straight-leg bottoms: this could be jeans, colorful pants, or a column skirt
- Slim shoes: the general “slim” descriptor makes it versatile across seasons
- Structured bag: an option to add polish when coworking at a café
By thinking in these various layers (vibe, shapes, colors & textures, and lifestyle & values) you can build outfits that feel authentic to you while fitting the constraints of the external situation.
What About One-Off Unique Situations?
Like this Wednesday evening, I spoke on a “Sustainable Fashion in Action” panel with Chicago Climate Connect during Sustainable Fashion Week Chicago. But the panel was also taking place at the Patagonia x Worn Wear store.
So the vibe was professional meets fashion, but also kinda casual?! And we are still in the Midwest here. I have to say, this one wasn’t easy.
But here’s the step-by-step thought process that helped me balance my style, function, and a unique-to-me context.
- I picked a foundational piece: My navy wide-leg trousers were business casual without being too formal and were practical for train travel.
- And functional accessories:My old Coach bag fits everything and my chunky Veja sneakers matched the vibe I was going for so those were the picks.
- Then a piece that brought it all together:At this point I was mixing high-contrast colors (white with navy & black) and different vibes (trousers vs. sneakers). I felt like I needed a bridge for the outfit, and this navy-striped vest tied it all together.
- Finally, some final touches: Gold jewelry made the look feel more “me”, while this cap from Abbie at The Filtery made it all feel effortless.
In the end, this outfit took a lot longer to create than a typical look.
It took longer to create than my usual outfits, but it felt just right. The combination was practical, suited my style, fit the vibe of the panel, and aligned with the weather.
This panel outfit reminded me that style is what we wear to express ourselves, but it’s also a tool to help us navigate our lives. By thinking through these layers of personal style (vibe, shapes, colors, textures, and lifestyle needs) we can balance showing up authentically while honoring the nuances or navigating the constraints of a situation.
For me, that’s the real power of personal style.
One single outfit can’t tell the whole story of who we are. But personal style can be flexible, functional, and expressive of the many sides of our multi-dimensional nature.
So lately, more than asking “does this outfit perfectly express my full self?” I’ve been finding myself asking:
“Does this outfit help me show up in the way I want to? Does it say what I want it to say in this particular moment?“
The post You’re multi-dimensional. So is your style. appeared first on .
Last Updated on October 2, 2025
It’s no secret my greatest love is theatre. From the time I was three years old, I knew I wanted to be an actor.
In an effort to make new friends after moving to Maine, I auditioned for a local production of Shrek. (One of my least favorite shows, but full of some of my soon-to-be favorite people). And you know what it taught me? Third places (theatre being one of them) matter.
Thanks to theatre, I fell into a gorgeous community, and these days, I volunteer in (almost) every corner (painting sets, assisting with costumes, and of course performing!). Here’s everything you need to know about what a third place is and why we need more of them.
what is a third place?
A third place is a public spot you can meet and connect with others through a shared interest or skill (like theatres!).
Third places are fantastic for socializing, exchanging ideas, and building community. Basically, a safe space to be yourself and find like-minded people.
Many third places are also entirely free, or low-cost. This is incredibly important because almost everywhere you go nowadays requires payment just to get in or participate. This creates an air of exclusivity and can keep lower income communities away.
But several third place areas are entirely free (like libraries and parks), or accessible due to their affordable pricing.
And beyond being good for our wallets, third places are equally good for our health. That’s because humans are social creatures that enjoy being around other people.
At third places like cafes, you can interact with strangers from various backgrounds and incomes in a positive, safe environment. Because everyone, from all walks of life, are welcome there.
why are third places disappearing?
Third places aren’t necessarily disappearing, but they were impacted by the pandemic when being around groups of people became hazardous.
Specifically, third places like coffee shops, bars, and gyms were hit hardest. However, the opposite was true for parks – everyone became aware just how important our outdoor spaces are.
That said, many third places never fully recovered from the pandemic when certain businesses realized they could function 100% remote. For example, if no one is arriving in person to a business office, a nearby cafe might suffer from less foot traffic. And rising rents don’t help matters.
Last but not least, certain people may find it difficult to locate a third place near them if they live in a rural setting. Third places tend to be easier to locate in cities.
However, third places can also be found through online communities (more on that later). The irony is the internet has also led to the decline of physical third places.
I think it’s important to have both so there’s a balance. Online communities are amazing, but there’s something about meeting people in person that hits different.
how is a third place different from a hangout?
A third place is different from a hangout in the sense you go there to socialize without any specific goal in mind. Or sometimes, you don’t socialize at all – but simply want to be around other like-minded people.
Whereas a hangout is more planned, a third places doesn’t demand any kind of itinerary or interaction if you don’t want to. Sometimes just hearing neighboring gossip or interacting with a barista is enough.
For example, if you go to a gym, you could chat up the person using the machine next to you. Or, you could simply enjoy the presence of others. There’s no right or wrong.
But with a hangout, you go with the intention of socializing and getting to know someone (or multiple someones).
how is a third place different from a club?
A third place is different from a club in the sense that clubs tend to be more exclusive, whereas third places are for everyone.
Typically, third places don’t have memberships (unless they’re gyms). There’s no barrier between you and that place. Everyone is welcome.
For example, if you’re trying to get into a ‘Homeowners Club’ the one requirement would be to be a homeowner. Which many Americans cannot afford, especially considering the cost of living is going up.
There’s no obligation to be at a third place. Nor are there any specific dress codes or strict requirements. Anyone from any class, culture and gender can participate without pulling rank.
why do third places matter?
Third places matter because they offer people another place to relax, unwind, and connect outside of their homes. Without spending aberrant amounts of money.
Third places encourage social connection without any pressure to perform. We choose how much we engage, if at all. And sometimes just being around other people is enough.
During the pandemic when only essential personnel were leaving the house, it was a stark reminder of how important these spaces are. Without human connection, mental health suffers.
On top of this, third places can be wonderful, neutral areas to do work and start projects. Think of your local cafe, bursting with people doodling in sketchbooks, writing in notepads and typing on laptops.
People flock to these locations not just for free WiFi – but to experience a change of scenery. Make light hearted conversation. Savor a cup of coffee made by someone else. Whatever the reason, there’s a clear need for them.
what are examples of third places?
There are several examples of third places, including:
- Libraries
- Parks, playgrounds and dog parks
- Cafes
- Theatres
- Bars and lounges
- State parks and nature reserves
- Gyms and yoga studios
- Recreation or community centers
- Community beautification group
- Community gardens
- Privately owned public spaces (like a plaza)
These are just a few I could think of off the top of my head, but I’m sure there are plenty more third places.
Also, be mindful of online third places as well! For those who don’t have access to any of the above, you may be able to find solace with online communities like Reddit groups, digital book clubs, Instagram group chats, and WhatsApp community groups.
That being said, there’s a charm to visiting a third place in person. So if you’re able, and have access to one, definitely take full advantage!
So, will you be visiting a third place? Let me know in the comments!
The post What Is a Third Place and Why Do They Matter? appeared first on Going Zero Waste.
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