William Nordhaus, who turned 82 this year, was the first economist in our time to attempt to quantify the cost of climate change. His climate-modeling wizardry, which won him the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2018, has made him one of the world’s most consequential thinkers. His ideas…

In 2023 the United Nations’ authority on water warned that a global water crisis was imminent. For many communities, this crisis is already upon them, with water shortages affecting over a third of the world’s population, and many others dealing with devastating floods caused by climate change. The UN predicts…

Feeding a growing world population has been a serious concern for decades, but today there are new causes for alarm. Floods, heat waves and other weather extremes are making agriculture increasingly precarious, especially in the Global South. The war in Ukraine is also a factor. Russia is blockading Ukrainian grain…

World Celebration Days are ways to highlight a cause, to collectively focus and bring important ideas to public attention at the community level while uniting globally behind them. Several important days were packed into the month of June. These included World Bicycle Day, followed two days later by World Environment…

One late-summer day, a day so hot the mosquitoes weren’t flying, my brother and his wife and I traveled nine miles up the Unalakleet River to seine for humpies, or pink salmon. We laughed and hollered while pulling the net to a flat, wide bar made of perfect skipping and…

In Ladakh and elsewhere in India, the built environment is increasingly dominated by structures that required unsustainable construction methods and non-renewable materials. Meanwhile, older traditional buildings are usually marginalized and neglected. A primary feature of this shift involves the use of concrete, “ the most destructive material on Earth “…

I don’t know why exactly we gravitate to certain writers or thinkers, not just as convenient citations we drop here and there, maybe to add a bit of heft to our own flimsy pronouncements or to have the sheen of their prose shine on our lackluster sentences — but as…

In the ‘green economy,’ the interests of corporations, governments and the conservation industry intersect. All of these entities, in one way or another, profit from the destruction of forests and the dispossession of communities. The REDD mechanism (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) is a key element of the…

Oaxaca, one of the most biodiverse and culturally rich states in Mexico has, over the last two decades, rapidly exploded into a booming tourist destination. Visitors find themselves lost in the beauty of its diverse cultures, artisan crafts, vibrant cuisine, and its most famous beverage — mezcal. Tequila and mezcal…