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The Karez is a modern-day engineering marvel and a prime example of a native people working with, not against, the forces of nature to deliver their needs – in this case, water. Today, this system nourishes an area called Grape Valley, once an oasis for weary travelers along the Silk Road.
A Japanese farm introduced a new crop this winter: an organic banana with a peel that’s thin enough to eat. In a nod to this appealing outer covering, Setsuzo Tanaka, the banana’s inventor, has named his creation the Mongee (“mon-gay”) banana — which means “incredible banana” in Japanese.
As psychiatrists and philosophers begin to define a pervasive mental health crisis triggered by climate change, they ask who is really sick: the individual or society?
Icefin has reached the point at which the warm ocean water meets the wall of ice at the front of the mighty Thwaites glacier – the point where this vast body of ice begins to melt. Glaciologists have described Thwaites as the “most important” glacier in the world, the “riskiest” glacier, even the “doomsday” glacier.
Wood products that are nearly as strong as steel are going into more high-rises, locking up carbon. But can we grow enough trees to keep pace? A paradigm threatened by the very climate crisis that makes carbon-sucking buildings seem appealing.
Some want a clear conscience. Others want to see if they are up to the challenge. But none of them want to wait until 2050 to cut their carbon emissions down to near-zero. Across the UK, environmentalists of all ages – from seven to 75 – are taking action now to lead low-carbon lives.
A handful of supermarkets in Vietnam are attempting to move away from plastic. One of the most-pernicious, least-recycled/recyclable forms is the plastic film that food is often wrapped in. So supermarket chains including Lotte Mart, Saigon Co.op and Big C have started wrapping produce in banana leaves rather than plastic.
Any building playing host to hundreds of people is going to have a huge climate footprint, but the glass is particularly problematic. The sunlight has unlimited access into the building, but no way to get out. That’s great for tomatoes, but for people it just means more air conditioning.
For the last 150 years, Pacific Gas & Electric has been playing political hardball to maintain its monopoly over California’s electricity. Last year, a PG&E power line ignited the Camp Fire, which killed 85 people, making it the deadliest wildfire in the state’s history.
While most sane people would run for cover at the sight of heavy rain or snow, that’s the precise moment when French photographer Christophe Jacrot pulls out his camera and gets to work.
After three years of severe drought, Cape Town was at risk of becoming one of the first cities in the world to run out of municipal water. Nicholas Sloane has a fix for a country struggling with its supply.
For a very long time, people couldn’t have imagined a circus show without horses, elephants, monkeys, and lions. But recently, Circus Roncalli has shunned tradition, swapping flesh and blood for hologram projections. The shows, however, remain just as spectacular.
Architecture studio Rombout Frieling Lab and Research Institutes of Sweden have created the Station of Being as a prototype bus stop. The bus stop in Umeå, Sweden, was designed to improve the waiting conditions for passengers using public transport in cold weather conditions within the Arctic region.
Big nations might be struggling to avoid a two-degree temperature rise but the Arctic island of Greenland is welcoming it. A beautiful look inside how the island nation has changing attitudes about climate change.
The Citarum River in Indonesia is the world’s most polluted river. One of the main polluters is the fashion industry: 500 textile factories throw their wastewater directly into the river. The filmmakers teamed up with international scientists to investigate the causes and consequences of this pollution.
Incredible feats of genetic engineering and frozen biobanks could prevent Australia’s iconic marsupials from disappearing for good. If that sounds far-fetched, it isn’t. In fact, it’s already happening.
After the devastation of the 2004 tsunami, aid agencies promised to rebuild Indonesia “better.” Fifteen years later, their failures are all too obvious. The disaster hit Aceh the hardest. The evacuation buildings are unmistakably the shiniest features of the city’s newly built landscape.
Photographer Sushavan Nandy experienced the devastating effects of flooding first hand, as a child living in Jalpaiguri in North Bengal, India. This project shows the disruptive effects of climate change and flooding on individual lives.
Only three people have ever reached the bottom of the deepest part of the ocean. The deep is a world without sunlight, of freezing temperatures, and immense pressure. It’s remained largely unexplored until now. Cutting-edge technology is enabling a new generation of aquanauts to go deeper than ever before.
Huge amounts of rice straw are left over after the harvest in Thailand. Farmers often burn it, which is terrible for the environment. A young entrepreneur has found a new use for the material. Turned into paper, it can replace plastic food packaging.
Ocean water is saturated with salt, and undrinkable. Most of the freshwater is locked away in glaciers or deep underground. Less than one percent of it is available to us. So why can’t we just take all that seawater, filter out the salt, and have a nearly unlimited supply of clean, drinkable water?
After a public backlash against marine animal parks brought on by the documentary Blackfish, the aquarium decided to move its prized pod of dolphins to a first-of-its-kind sanctuary.
Five miles off the coast of Yemen lies a floating bomb. An oil storage vessel called the FSO Safer has been sitting more or less unattended in the Red Sea for half a decade. The abandoned oil tanker with over a million barrels of oil on board is an environmental catastrophe waiting to happen.
Commercial shipping – for many years resistant to the low carbon revolution sweeping other areas of transportation – is changing fast. Could a new generation of innovative propulsion technologies that harness the power of the wind help the shipping industry clean up its act?
The equator spins at 1,037 mph, whereas Chicago takes a more leisurely (approximately 750 mph) pace. If we could speed up Earth’s rotation by one mile per hour, the sea level around the equator would rise by a few inches as water migrates there from the poles.
Today, 40 percent of oil and gas rigs working in the United States are located on what is known as the Permian Basin, a vast oil reserve covering 75,000 square miles in West Texas and southeastern New Mexico. A movement is forming to protect the night sky from light pollution given off by the drilling operations.
In 1986, the city of Aksu in China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region began an ambitious tree-planting project that looked to turn swaths of desert into forest. The result was over 13 million acres of green that became the Kekeya greening project.
In the fall of 2018, the 26-year-old American missionary traveled to a remote speck of sand and jungle in the Indian Ocean, attempting to convert one of the planet’s last uncontacted tribes to Christianity. The islanders killed him, and Chau was pilloried around the world as a deluded Christian supremacist who deserved to die.
Emerging studies show that air pollution is linked to impaired judgement, mental health problems, poorer performance in school and most worryingly perhaps, higher levels of crime. These findings are all the more alarming, given that more than half of the world’s population now live in urban environments.
In addition to responsibly sourcing fish, Eric Ripert stresses that seeking out freshness and using proper technique will help guarantee success with fish in the home kitchen. Here are a few ways he recommends keeping seafood cookery interesting, delicious, and sustainable.
Two fledgling projects led by animal-welfare groups hope to offer a lifeline to struggling farmers by helping them trade animal agriculture for alternative proteins. The groups say the shift benefits animals and the environment, while boosting farmers’ economic outlook.
In 1988, Sabarmatee and her father Radhamohan bought an acre of degraded land in Nayagarh district of Odisha. They wanted to set up an experiment to see if a forest using organic techniques. Organic farming was not widespread in India at that time, therefore they had to rely on trial and error.
300 km North of the Arctic Circle, on the tip of the island Andøya lies Andenes. A small town located amid dramatic landscapes – both above and below the ocean’s surface. The new Arctic attraction, The Whale, tells the story of the big inhabitants of this underwater world, rising as a soft hill on the rocky shore– as if a giant had lifted a thin layer of the crust of the earth and created a cavity underneath.
Rahawa Haile grew up surrounded by the beauty and kitsch of South Florida. Now she returns and wonders what happens when the places we love start to disappear.
Like her school-skipping compatriot Pippi Longstocking, the classic of children’s literature created by Swedish author Astrid Lindgren, Greta Thunberg loves calling bullshit on adults, their “nuanced” worldview and self-congratulating conspiracies.
New high-resolution satellites, AIs, and data tools are going to let us study Earth, and ourselves, in greater detail than ever before. That’s going to come with “unthinkable” problems.
There was nothing charming about what the British built. It wasn’t meant to protect anything except imperial revenue. It grew along the Inland Customs Line, a bureaucratic barrier that the British created to impose a high salt tax on the people living on one side of the line—the relatively saltless one.
Several years in the past decade have reached new lows for summer sea ice extent, raising questions about what will happen in this new Arctic as the ice declines and retreats. How will the ecosystem respond? Can treaties keep fishing in the central Arctic in check?
The planet’s tallest animal is in far greater danger than people might think. Until recently, giraffes have suffered from surprising scientific neglect. Few researchers have studied them in the wild, so even basic aspects of their lives remain mysterious.
To bring the spirit in-line with its contemporaries, Air Co. has applied a process that converts air-based carbons into pure ethanol using a proprietary, solar-based electrical procedure. The result? An 80-proof vodka that looks, tastes, and feels like the traditional spirit, but with a reduced environmental impact due to its specialized “distillation” process.
