The end of the world, like everything worth knowing these days, will be tweeted: NASA-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for ‘irreversible collapse’? | Nafeez Ahmed http://t.co/nWqOcD3UkB — Guardian Environment (@guardianeco) March 14, 2014 If a study with the imprimatur of a major U.S. government agency thinks civilization may soon be destined to fall apart, I…Continue Reading…
Paul Ehrlich and Ann Ehrlich, two long-time prominent voices in the environmental community, often speculate about the future of humanity. They recently shared this anecdote: A few years ago we had a disagreement with our friend Jim Brown, a leading ecologist. We told him we thought there was about a 10 percent chance of avoiding a…Continue Reading…
If you are a regular consumer of environmental news and commentary, you are familiar with the narrative of humanity’s downfall. The story, we are told, looks like this. If we continue to ignore the danger signs while exceeding the planet’s carrying capacity, the future may get ugly. For the time being, we are on…Continue Reading…
It’s not often that an aging social movement gets a chance to redefine and reinvigorate itself. Environmentalism has that opportunity now, with the Anthropocene, which National Geographic has dubbed, The Age of Man. What does that mean? As I recently wrote in Slate, the Anthropocene represents a growing scientific consensus that the contemporary human footprint—our cities, suburban…Continue Reading…
HuffPo’s minky in-house science blogger talks GMOs with a plant geneticist. (Hey, you don’t title your show/column”Talk nerdy to me” if you look like Ann Ramsey in Throw Momma from the Train.) The scientist who was interviewed says the science blogger knows her stuff. I agree. I watched it about 12 times. Then I moved on…Continue Reading…
They capture our imagination. They help frame public discourse on important issues. Just one problem: some of our most famous eco-metaphors have not held up to the test of time. At the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media, I suggest that some of the more popular ones stick around past their expiration date. Have…Continue Reading…
UPDATE: Some of the information and assertions in this post have been disputed by Jared Diamond here. In 1995, Jared Diamond wrote an article for Discover magazine that began: In just a few centuries, the people of Easter Island wiped out their forest, drove their plants and animals to extinction, and saw their complex society spiral…Continue Reading…
Gail the Actuary, who often writes about peak oil and resource scarcity issues at The Oil Drum, makes the case here that we’re on borrowed time. But unlike Jeremy Grantham, she doesn’t think we can do anything about it: There is no real solution to our predicament. Even if a cheap liquid fuel could be found…Continue Reading…
On a recent post of mine at Climate Central, one reader left an impassioned comment that sounded as if he considered overpopulation to be the greatest threat to humanity. I’m going to break it up into three parts. Here’s the challenge, as he explained it: An even more overlooked problem is overpopulation (defined as living…Continue Reading…