We all know that the carbon legacy of our fossil fuel-based lifestyles is bequeathing a climate crisis to billions of people into the future. But when we say “future”, just how far should we be ...

Globalisation is killing bees, as bee pests and diseases are being passed swiftly around the world thanks to the opening up of trade, says United Nations study. Attempts to industrialise pollination ...

With the topic of peak global oil production moving more into the mainstream, you have perhaps heard of the Canadian oil sands. There, huge tracts of remote forested land are strip-mined to obtain a ...

Recently I’ve been enjoying dirty thoughts. I spend my days in a sterile 8×10 room practicing family medicine and yet my mind is in the soil. This is because I’m discovering just how much this rich, ...

The world record yield for paddy rice production is not held by an agricultural research station or by a large-scale farmer from the United States, but by a farmer in the state of Bihar in northern ...

The great drylands of the planet — and they cover almost half of the terrestrial surface — may be bigger players in the carbon cycle than anyone had suspected. The world’s semi-arid regions may absorb ...

In these difficult months following the 11 March quake and tsunami, it has been a time for reflection and an opportunity to ponder what the future holds in store for Japan. Some hints of what a better ...

Fuelled by a growing international appetite for leather, the industry represents a sizeable chunk of Bangladesh’s yearly export revenues — $284 million in 2007-08. There are about 200 leather ...

Last March, Tim Jackson put forward the idea of prosperity without growth in a report published by the United Kingdom’s Sustainable Development Commission and followed up with a book of the same name ...

It is often said that our greatest successes arrive after our darkest hours. The Hammarby Sjöstad eco-town, located a few kilometres south of Stockholm’s city centre, was developed following the ...

Parents in despair because they can’t pay the fees at the privatised neighbourhood school… Families left without healthcare because the mining company that pollutes their river also dodges the taxes ...

In the science-fiction film The Man Who Fell to Earth, David Bowie famously portrayed an alien from a planet running out of water. He left. However, we — on planet earth — cannot. Ironically, it was ...