Now this initiative bears watching, because it gets beyond the fuzzy climate change cause-and-effect rhetoric. If adaptation is going to be done right in Africa–or anywhere–then this approach strikes me as a really smart way to go about it: “It is not enough to say that Ethiopia is vulnerable,” says Joshua Busby, an assistant professor…Continue Reading…
This article by Roger Webster, a South African historian, is intriguing on several levels. I was drawn in by this opening: One of the many aspects of history and archaeology that fascinates me is that, in many respects, archaeology becomes the verifier, or the destroyer, of history. Be sure to read it all the way…Continue Reading…
Yesterday, in response to a story in the NY Times, entitled “Sudan Court Fines Woman for Wearing Trousers,” Andy Revkin posted this meta thought at Dot Earth about the future of women in the developing world and how that ties into humanity’s prospects for sustainability: In a broader sense, then, there appears to be simmering…Continue Reading…
Half of Zimbabwe’s 12 million people already rely on emergency food aid. Now, according to this UN dispatch, food shortages are being compounded by elephants eating and trampling the villagers’ crops. The scenes sound like something out of a Hitchcock movie, with villagers also guarding their agricultural fields from marauding baboons, wild pigs, and flocks…Continue Reading…