Work by Stockholm-based NGO Trase reveals the extent to which the international demand for beef is driving deforestation, with thousands of hectares of Amazon being felled every year to provide meat for world markets.
Nowhere on the planet is heating faster than Svalbard. This was the message of a report commissioned by the Norwegian Environment Agency, unveiled in February to a stunned audience in Longyearbyen, the archipelago’s de facto capital.
From Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s claims that Canada needs the Trans Mountain Pipeline to reach new oil markets in Asia (they’re mythical!) to his statement that there will be “shovels in the ground” this summer (the pipeline route isn’t approved!), here are the...
Flanked by a fleet of cabinet ministers, Justin Trudeau has announced that his government is proceeding with a $9.3-billion pipeline project to triple shipments of diluted bitumen from Alberta to the Lower Mainland.
Greenhouse gas emissions in the UK will be cut to almost zero by 2050, under the terms of a new government plan to tackle climate change. Prime Minister Theresa May said there was a “moral duty to leave this world in a better condition than what we...
Scottish Power is to undertake the most ambitious battery power project in Europe in an attempt to unlock the potential of the UK’s wind and solar farms. The company will connect an industrial-scale battery, the size of half a football pitch, to the Whitelee onshore...
We have about 12 years to avoid the worst effects of climate change and prevent a mass extinction event. We should certainly work on the long-term population trend, but that doesn’t let us off the hook for reducing consumption.
Is the collapse of a civilisation necessarily calamitous? The failure of the Egyptian Old Kingdom towards the end of the 2nd millennium BCE was accompanied by riots, tomb-raids and even cannibalism. ‘The whole of Upper Egypt died of hunger and each individual had...
Nature itself will be shaped by processes redesigned and ‘improved’ by geneticists and engineers. We should call this transition the beginning of a ‘synthetic age’, a time in which background constants are increasingly replaced by artificial and ‘improved’ versions of...
When researchers at Emory University in Atlanta trained mice to fear the smell of almonds (by pairing it with electric shocks), they found, to their consternation, that both the children and grandchildren of these mice were spontaneously afraid of the same smell. That...
What is the relationship of democracy to time? This question may seem abstract but is actually foundational. … Every person, whether or not they have children, exists as both a successor and an ancestor. We are all born into a world we did not make, subject to...
On land, in the seas, in the sky, the devastating impact of humans on nature is laid bare in a compelling UN report. One million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction. Nature everywhere is declining at a speed never previously seen and our need...
In Blaire French’s 1998 novel The Ticking Tenure Clock, the central character, a junior political science professor, is struggling to finish a book on the “Orphans of the Left”: animal rights activists. According to French, animal rights activists in the 1990s saw...
For most of my adult life I’ve railed against “corporate capitalism”, “consumer capitalism” and “crony capitalism”. It took me a long time to see that the problem is not the adjective but the noun. While some people have rejected capitalism gladly and swiftly, I’ve...
Daniel Werding, Christin Bernhold and David Müller are members of the Alliance for Marxism and Animal Liberation. The Alliance is a political association of various animal liberation groups centered in Germany and Switzerland. It was formed to support research,...
For the Maya of the Classic period, who lived in southern Mexico and Central America between 250 and 900 CE, the category of ‘persons’ was not coincident with human beings, as it is for us. That is, human beings were persons – but other, nonhuman entities could be...
Dr. Joanne Chory is working to design plants capable of storing even more carbon dioxide in their roots. Her Ideal Plant project uses gene editing – via traditional horticulture and Crispr – to do so. On a large scale, this could suck enough carbon out of the...
With the federal government’s backstop price on carbon pollution taking effect in Ontario, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and New Brunswick, opponents of this vital climate solution have ratcheted up the bombast. However, British Columbia’s experience with its carbon tax...
“Canada is, on average, experiencing warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world, with Northern Canada heating up at almost three times the global average, according to a new government report. The study — Canada’s Changing Climate Report (CCCR) —...
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