Theme: Environment
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Migration likely brings to mind the familiar sight of geese flying overhead in their iconic V formation, honking stridently as they fly toward their faraway goal. But the migration of many birds is a rarely observed phenomenon. Most passerine birds, a group that includes songbirds and groups taxonomically related to them, migrate at night. Read more
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For most of my adult life, beginning, really, in the rebellious years of adolescence, I have been against nature. This phrase, against nature, is the standard title for the English translation of J.-K. Huysmans' splendid 1884 novel, À rebours, but when I use it here, I don't mean generally perverted or out-of-whack. I mean I have cultivated a consummately urban existence, and have insisted that people who rush off to commune with the great outdoors are wasting their time. Read more
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If you had to be an endangered animal, you’d be better off as a tiger than a toad. If you were a tiger, filmmakers might cast you in wildlife documentaries and journalists might write heart-rending stories about the disappearance of your kind. Your furry mug might appear on magazine covers and postage stamps.Read more
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Sandra Steingraber reads her essay about the fiftieth anniversary of ecologist Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, accompanied by fracking photographs by Nina Berman.Read more
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I got a new lesson on the force of narrative during the blackout that affected much of the mid-west and east coast in early July. It was the third time our own neighborhood had experienced an extended power outage in four years. This time, however, the temperatures soared to the 100F mark for eight powerless days.Read more
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Can capitalism effectively respond to climate change? This is the timely and critically important question posed by Peter Newell and Matthew Paterson at the beginning of their book, Climate Capitalism. It is the same question that motivated me to focus my own research on the topic of business and climate change nearly fifteen years ago.Read more
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This is intended to be a conservation book with a difference. While most others concentrate on the gloom and doom, my aim is to explore the glimmers of good news. ere is no doubt that nature is in grave trouble and that time is fast running out. The year 2010 was the International Year of Biodiversity, during which the world’s governments admitted they had failed to meet internationally agreed-upon targets to slow nature’s disappearance. But is nature’s continued loss inevitable, or are there grounds for hope?Read more
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You can’t see through cement – and neither can I. When I look at Lahore and the ways in which cement has cordoned off sight-lines, I see a city full of people blind-folded. The gated communities were the first variant – ghettos of the elite – where cement walls rose up to seclude and to protect. Read more
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Deep in the African rainforest and three days from home, a tribal hunter, punting down a backwater, puts aside his spear and takes out a GPS handset. He doesn’t need the Global Positioning System to know where he is. He is intimate with every inch of his tribe’s forests. But he taps an icon on the screen to identify the burial ground, sacred grove, or wildlife-rich swamp he is passing, then puts the handset back in his hunting bag, and carries on. Read more
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What about nature's “lies?” Notice that wild rice grows naturally almost as a monoculture, not mixed with other plant species. Tropical forests, on the other hand, have much greater species diversity.Read more
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Visitors and residents alike tend to think of New Zealand as a clean, green land, rivaling Ireland in the luxuriance of its verdure and leading the world in the naturalness of its nature. In Seeds of Empire, Tom Brooking, Eric Pawson, and their collaborators point out that the rolling meadows that cover much of New Zealand were built on a particular colonial ideology of food production and inputs of large amounts of fertilizer.Read more
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Sustainability is quickly becoming the lingua franca of public discourse. It is endorsed by government agencies around the globe, championed by increasing numbers of international non-governmental organizations, and put into daily practice by residents and consumers.Read more
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For Jaypee, the road to Formula 1 began more than four years earlier, in January 2003, when the company was awarded a contract by the UP government to build what’s now known as the Yamuna Expressway. Read more
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