Slowing biodiversity loss by designating half the world as a nature reserve

Slowing biodiversity loss is more than a desire, it is an imperative if we are to feed everyone well. The problem is that the ideas to slow extinction rates often involve a compromise with food production and other land use.

Urban Growth May Not Happen As Imagined

If the trend of the last 100 years continues, by 2050, three, out of four people will live in urban areas. This urban growth might not be a good thing.

Daydreamers die of thirst | how our evolutionary past shapes our discounting of the future

Imagine for a moment that you are in the mind and physically fit body of your ancestor somewhere on the African savanna 70,000 years ago. What happens next?

Comment | The graph that explains so much

Historians and anyone with half an eye on the past know that the world changed when abundant coal made industrial energy cheap, then natural gas for lighting, and again when oil replaced coal as the primary energy for transportation.

Sustainability over ecological time

Sustainability is a slippery concept. The conventional definition "use without depletion for future generations" is a fantasy because of one challenge.

Diversity of diet

Back before agriculture was invented, anthropologists suggest that modern humans, Homo sapiens, had a highly varied diet. Not perhaps as individuals who ate what they could get, but in the aggregate.

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