Deforestation contributes to global warming. A rising Earth temperature kills trees and damages forests. Dying trees release more carbon. Atmospheric carbon increases planet temperatures. This cycle of forest collapse represents a critical...

Last summer, for the first time in recorded history, boats could circumnavigate the North Pole. To the oblivious observer, this might seem like a good thing. Perhaps some green entrepreneur will build resorts on Finland's Svalbard Islands.

The nuclear industry has hitched a ride on the climate change bandwagon, proclaiming that nuclear power will solve the world's global warming and energy problems in one sweeping "nuclear renaissance."

In 1972, Ben and Dorothy Metcalfe from the budding Greenpeace Foundation in Canada attended the world's first UN Conference on the Human Environment, in Stockholm, where they succeeded in putting nuclear bomb tests on the agenda with the help of...

In 1969, Marie Aimee took her two children for medical treatment, a six-day voyage across the Indian Ocean from their home on Diego Garcia island to Port Louis, Mauritius. Her husband, Dervillie Permal, stayed behind to work at a coconut oil...

As the era of cheap liquid fuels draws to an end, everything about modern consumer society will change. Likewise, developing societies pursuing the benefits of globalization will struggle to grow economies in an era of scarce liquid fuels. The...

In the 1980s, fishermen caught the last wild Beluga sturgeon from the Sea of Azov, source of prized caviar, and wild sturgeon in the Caspian Sea failed to reproduce. The sturgeon catch plunged by 95 percent, and the cost of caviar soared. Such...

Since the late Pleistocene, 100,000 years ago, when a few thousand Homo sapiens poked around Africa, Asia, and the Mediterranean, human population has doubled 22 times. We have one more such doubling left, and that's it. Human population will...

History shows that human society can change if some moral force (civil rights, women's rights) challenges convention. However, before we can be optimistic about solving the environmental crisis, we must be realistic. Otherwise, our confidence is...