Clothing, air travel, food: we are once again consuming as if the climate crisis didn’t exist. But it may provide much needed clarity about how to actually protect the environment.
Tag: ecology
Pollution and climate change have prompted some cities to convert into more sustainable and liveable spaces. But these same policies can widen social inequality. How can cities fix this paradox?
Pollution and climate change have prompted some cities to convert into more sustainable and liveable spaces. But these same policies can widen social inequality. How can cities fix this paradox?
Haute-Garonne is the starting point of the movement that is now engulfing the entire industry. We report on farmers on the front line of a crisis that has gone national.
Each year, millions of trees are sacrificed for the sake of Christmas — an ecological disaster and a denial of what trees represent for humanity. There are, however, some green alternatives to buying (and killing) your own private tree each year.
The country known for the highest coal dependency in Europe has been experiencing a marked shift towards renewable energy sources, many on the micro scale.
Women in Italy are living longer than ever. But severe economic and social inequality and loneliness mean that they urgently need a new model for community living – one that replaces the “one person, one house, one caregiver” narrative we have grown accustomed to.
Trawling in Argentine waters is wiping out marine life in the southern Atlantic. Whatever the money stakes, Argentina must expand those territorial waters where all fishing is banned.
Like many creatures, hummingbirds consume alcohol, which they’re able to metabolize quickly. A new study explains how they do it — and how it might just helps us understand why humans are so attracted to alcohol.
Since last year, over half of the fish in the river have died, and Germany’s environment minister has said that Poland has not done enough to prevent a repeat of the incident. Now the Oder, which runs through the Czech Republic, Poland, and Germany, is experiencing fish death en masse once again. Was this catastrophe doomed to repeat itself? Reporters from German newspaper Die Zeit and Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza looked for answers.
The Salton Sea is a 316-square mile, shallow glaze of water in Southern California that has been receding in recent years. Scientists believe the toxic dust kicked up from the exposed lakebed is contributing to respiratory disease in the region. It now offers a tableau of dead wildlife, toxic dust, and neglect.
Scientists are increasingly seeing evidence of “dark extinction” in museum and botanical garden collections.
In Bolivia, the coca leaf was once reserved for ancestry rituals and practices. Now it is being combined with other substances, especially amongst the very young, to create a toxic experience and dangerous concoction.
Election day is approaching in Turkey. Unemployment, runaway inflation and eroding rule of law are top of mind for many. But one subject isn’t getting the attention it deserves: the environment.
Thanks to advances in science, the reintroduction of extinct animal species is now feasible — even inevitable. But beyond possible benefits for biodiversity, these projects raise numerous environmental and ethical dilemmas.
Kampala’s air quality is much worse than globally accepted standards, but several interventions are being instituted to avert its effects.
The week-long climate summit in Egypt managed to a backsliding that looked possible at some point, it still failed to deliver on significant change to reverse the effects of global warming.
The Egyptian coastal resort has been reinvented (again) to host world leaders for the COP27, as it aims to cast a climate-financing-hungry Egypt in a favorable light. But the cosmetic changes hide years of harm to the region’s ecosystem.
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The Bogus Concept Of “Carbon-Neutral” Oil
The Colombian president recently said that the country had exported one million barrels of carbon-neutral or offset oil. But in an unregulated carbon market, such a claim is pure greenwashing.
When humans care about the natural world, it means revising our place in it and acting accordingly, not giving nature “rights and concessions” that are figments of our self-serving imagination.
The Danish government has banned further growth in sea-based fish farming, claiming the country had reached the limit without endangering the environment. A marine biologist says it is a misguided policy for both economic and ecological reasons.
The final deal at COP26 falls well short of what’s needed to confront global warming. Still, the Glasgow summit has provided a new blueprint for how we measure progress — and shown how pressure can be applied to world leaders.
Local villagers in western India have been forced to live with a mining waste site on the edge of town. What happens when you wake up one day and the giant mound of industrial waste has imploded?
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Dissecting The Ethics Of Eating Bugs
While bugs and insects have less of an environmental impact than other protein sources, the question remains of how to humanly harvest them.
The Hass avocado, fast becoming one of Colombia’s big export earners, is threatening local ecosystems and causing water shortages.
The Green party is in a very strong position as the campaign begins to succeed Angela Merkel. Their environmental ideals mask an illiberal intolerance for their opponents.
For areas like the Mediterranean basin, tourism is huge business. But it’s also an inordinate source of plastic pollution.
The government recently gave foreigners the go-ahead to visit 137 peaks in four states, paving the way for a potential flood of visitors to the world’s tallest mountain range.
There are plenty of reasons for pessimism. But we also need to keep trying — and hoping — for ways to cooperate across continents.
The fashion industry sees that protection of the environment is a hot selling point, and maybe also a long-term trend.
In far southern Argentina, writer Pablo Bizón recalls a chance encounter with a woman who followed her passion for science all the way from Kent State to Patagonia.
PARIS — Suspected of hacking a dissident into pieces in its consulate in Istanbul, the Saudi regime has become the target of public outrage — until the story dies down, at least. Which raises an important question: should French museums, opera houses and festivals accept funding from the kingdom? It’s a sensitive issue, as Saudi […]
Rescuing the planet from the ravages of capitalism may be just the thing our dominant economic system needs to save itself, columnist Jean-Marc Vittori argues.
Activists in Colombia are working with public and private entities, offline and online, to reduce and recycle every ounce of solid waste produced.
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Welcome To The Trumpocene
A guiding principle of modern democracy holds that a system of checks and balances helps prevent any single person or faction from making radical changes to the existing order. That the wheels of legislation move slowly, and recourse is available through courts or other branches of government, may be a hair-pulling reality for those trying […]
Lives destroyed, entire towns damaged, widespread health problems. There is no end in sight to the toll on a region in Brazil decimated by a toxic dam break last November.
Our planet has actually grown greener. Really. You can thank yourself.
For anyone truly concerned with climate change, trends like rooftop gardens and sustainable badges for office buildings are a distraction, at best.
Panamanian holding a drone — Photo: UN Food and Agriculture Organization Members of Panama’s 12 indigenous nations are embracing a cutting-edge technology — drones — in an effort to protect their ancestral lands. Roughly 7.4 million hectares of rainforest cover more than half of Panamanian territory, but it is rapidly disappearing, some estimate by as […]
The legacy of our time will not be our literary or architectural monuments, but all the plastic trash we leave to poison the seas and choke our future. Fortunately, change is in the air.