Our planet is heating up in a hurry!  Call in the Earth doctors!  Let’s fix the planet!   Now that we’ve pushed Earth systems out of the comfort zone, Earth and environmental scientists are increasingly being called on to address the big questions that affect all of us... [More]

Are humans pushing earth systems towards environmental catastrophe?  Or are we just worrying needlessly about the novel state of the earth that we have now created?  Or both? In a Nature Feature entitled “A safe operating space for humanity” a team of scientists affiliated w... [More]

Should we conserve nature even if it is not wild?  Humans have transformed 40% of earth’s ice-free land into crop fields, pastures and settlements, and have embedded another 37% within used and populated landscapes (anthromes).  While 23% is still free of people and their... [More]

Today, the Tata Nano (Wikipedia entry), the first “people’s car” of the 21st century, rolled out of a dealership in Mumbai, hitting the streets at 56 miles per gallon (and 1300 lbs; its a 4 passenger vehicle!).  Compare this with the pinnacle of US auto ingenuity, the Hummer... [More]

Millennia ago, our species reshaped the ecology of this planet and we have continued to reshape it ever more rapidly and intensively ever since.  Today, we directly use or alter nearly all of earth’s terrestrial ecosystems- the rest we alter indirectly through climate change. ... [More]

Finally some good news about global change: globalization is making us cooperate!  This is no minor discovery.  Poverty, global warming, environmental degradation and biodiversity loss- all of these will only be solved when all of the people of all nations collaborate sustainably in doing ... [More]

It will not be possible to solve global warming without dealing with the dramatic global and local inequalities in carbon emissions and the wealth created from them.  Since the Industrial Revolution began, some people and some nations have been pumping a lot more carbon into the atmosphere than... [More]

Are pristine rainforests the only ones that matter?  We know that forests do change as they age, developing some unique characteristics when mature, and that some species cannot live outside of large swaths of ancient tropical forests. But what about the rest of tropical forests- t... [More]