The future is in our hands
On the occasion of the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) His Holiness the Dalai Lama speaks on the need to tackle climate change as the future of our planet is in our hands.
E.O. Wilson’s lifelong passion for ants helped him teach humans about how to live sustainably with nature
Edward O. Wilson in his office in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, in 2014. Suzanne Kreiter/The Boston Globe via Getty Images By Doug Tallamy, University of Delaware E. O. Wilson was an extraordinary scholar in every sense of the word. Back in the 1980s, Milton Stetson, the chair of the biology department at the University of Delaware, told me that a scientist who makes a single seminal contribution to his or her field has been a success. By…
A relentless assault on the Amazon rainforest poses a threat to the planet
Georgina Gustin writes: The Amazon is enveloping and lush, a place of stupefying richness. But a powerful web of extractive forces is also at work here. Every day, thousands of miners, loggers, farmers and ranchers burn or cut roughly 10,000 acres of forest, working to satisfy a growing demand for the resources it contains. They are tiny cogs in a sprawling global machine that has destroyed nearly one-fifth of the Brazilian rainforest—an area about the size of California—over the last…
How border walls are triggering ecological disaster
George Monbiot writes: This is the century in which humanitarian and environmental disasters converge. Climate breakdown has driven many millions from their homes, and is likely to evict hundreds of millions more. The famine harrowing Madagascar at the moment is the first to have been named by the UN as likely to have been caused by the climate emergency. It will not be the last. Great cities find themselves dangerously short of water as aquifers are drained. Air pollution kills…
The threats to mountain ecosystems
Mountain ecosystems are threatened by: 🚜Expansion of agriculture & settlements upslope🌳Logging for timber & fuel⛰️Replacement of alpine systems by highland pastures🌱#InvasiveSpecies💦#ClimateChange —@IPBES #GlobalAssessment#InternationalMountainDay pic.twitter.com/bqLcVFpJNq — ipbes (@IPBES) December 8, 2021
A billion shellfish and other marine animals baked to death
Julia Rosen writes: During this summer’s stifling heat wave, Robin Fales patrolled the same sweep of shore on Washington’s San Juan Island every day at low tide. The stench of rotting sea life grew as temperatures edged toward triple digits—roughly 30 degrees above average—and Fales watched the beds of kelp she studies wilt and fade. “They were bleaching more than I had ever seen,” recalls Fales, a Ph.D. candidate and marine ecologist at the University of Washington. She didn’t know…
Pesticides harmful to bees in worse ways than previously thought
Science reports: Honey bees have a reputation for working hard, but carpenter bees and other bee species that don’t live in colonies might be even more industrious. For these so-called solitary bees, there is no dedicated worker class to help with rearing young and foraging. “Each female is kind of like a lone wolf,” says Clara Stuligross, a Ph.D. student at the University of California (UC), Davis. Now, a study by Stuligross and colleagues tallying the detrimental impacts of a…
Junk food is bad for plants, too
Anne Biklé and David R. Montgomery write: Most of us are familiar with the much-maligned Western diet and its mainstay of processed food products found in the middle aisles of the grocery store. Some of us beeline for the salty chips and others for the sugar-packed cereals. But we are not the only ones eating junk food. An awful lot of crops grown in the developed world eat a botanical version of this diet—main courses of conventional fertilizers with pesticide…
How the Western diet has derailed our evolution
Moises Velesquez-Manoff writes: For the microbiologist Justin Sonnenburg, that career-defining moment—the discovery that changed the trajectory of his research, inspiring him to study how diet and native microbes shape our risk for disease—came from a village in the African hinterlands. A group of Italian microbiologists had compared the intestinal microbes of young villagers in Burkina Faso with those of children in Florence, Italy. The villagers, who subsisted on a diet of mostly millet and sorghum, harbored far more microbial diversity…
What to learn from hedgerows
Katarina Zimmer writes: Hedgerows are as British as fish and chips. Without these walls of woody plants cross-stitching the countryside into a harmonious quilt of pastures and crop fields, the landscape wouldn’t be the same. Over the centuries, numerous hedges were planted to keep in grazing livestock, and some of today’s are as historic as many old churches, dating back as far as 800 years. Today, Britain boasts about 700,000 kilometers (435,000 miles) of them, a length that surpasses that…
Capitalism is killing the planet – it’s time to stop buying into our own destruction
George Monbiot writes: There is a myth about human beings that withstands all evidence. It’s that we always put our survival first. This is true of other species. When confronted by an impending threat, such as winter, they invest great resources into avoiding or withstanding it: migrating or hibernating, for example. Humans are a different matter. When faced with an impending or chronic threat, such as climate or ecological breakdown, we seem to go out of our way to compromise…
Halt destruction of nature or risk ‘dead planet’, leading businesses warn
The Guardian reports: World leaders must do more to prevent the destruction of nature, business leaders have warned before a summit in China that aims to draw up a draft UN agreement for biodiversity. In an open letter, the chief executives of Unilever, H&M and nine other companies have called on governments to take meaningful action on mass extinctions of wildlife and the collapse of ecosystems or risk “a dead planet”. The warning comes as China prepares to assume the…
The disastrous blindfolded rush to mine the deep sea
Jonathan Watts writes: A short bureaucratic note from a brutally degraded microstate in the South Pacific to a little-known institution in the Caribbean is about to change the world. Few people are aware of its potential consequences, but the impacts are certain to be far-reaching. The only question is whether that change will be to the detriment of the global environment or the benefit of international governance. In late June, the island republic of Nauru informed the International Seabed Authority…
How synchronous firefly flashes illuminate the physics of complex systems
Orit Peleg writes: In the still of the Tennessee night, my colleagues and I are watching thousands of dim little orbs of light, moving peacefully in the forest around us. We try to guess where the next flash will appear, but the movements seem erratic, even ephemeral. This summer, as we set up our cameras and tents, I feel a crippling sense of dread. I had brought us all up here to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, an unlikely…
The complexity of the biodiversity crisis
Nature reports: Scientists say it’s clear that there’s a biodiversity crisis, but there are many questions about the details. Which species will lose? Will new communities be healthy and desirable? Will the rapidly changing ecosystems be able to deal with climate change? And where should conservation actions be targeted? To find answers, scientists need better data from field sites around the world, collected at regular intervals over long periods of time. Such data don’t exist for much of the world,…
Video shows salmon injured by unlivable water temperatures after heatwave
The Guardian reports: Salmon in the Columbia River were exposed to unlivable water temperatures that caused them to break out in angry red lesions and white fungus in the wake of the Pacific north-west’s record-shattering heatwave, according to a conservation group that has documented the disturbing sight. In a video released on Tuesday by the non-profit organization Columbia Riverkeeper, a group of sockeye salmon swimming in a tributary of the river can be seen covered in injuries the group…