Cultural habits - like people - go through stages when they face death. Dr. Elizabeth Kübler-Ross described this process as the 'five stages of grief' - denial, anger, bargaining and depression, before the final acceptance of reality. In human...

The Toyota hybrid with a stuck accelerator and no brakes is a sad icon of our age. Our modern industrial society remains stuck on growth and does not know how to stop. Like the runaway Toyota, we are headed for a crash. The car, however, is...

As ecologists attempting to steer human civilisation back to a healthy relationship with the Earth, we benefit from understanding certain rules of nature, including the 'Net Energy' effect.

The Toyota hybrid with a stuck accelerator and no brakes is a sad icon of our age. Our modern industrial society remains stuck on growth and does not know how to stop. Like the runaway Toyota, we are headed for a crash. The car, however, is more...

Readers have asked if there exists a Greenpeace founding manifesto of original aims and principles. The 'Greenpeace Declaration of Interdependence', published in our newspaper in 1976 is a candidate,but this statement appeared five years after...

During the 1960s, art and politics merged into a full-spectrum cultural revolution - a liberation of music and poetry, political street theatre, socially-conscious films and novels. A fresh political awareness swept around the world; the women's...

In 1992, World Bank officials handed renowned economist Herman Daly adraft of its "Sustainable Development Report" to review. Daly hadwritten Steady-State Economics in 1977, proposing that economistsconsider the requirements of ecology.

The year 2009 will witness a tsunami of economic appeals to fix, as disgraced Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan put it, the 'flaw' in their thinking. Most will get it wrong.

Global economic systems crash not only because of greed, fraud and toxic assets, but because those systems rest on fallacies about the natural world. The Ponzi scams and derivatives swindles of international bankers are no substitute for real...

Car salesmen and burger tycoons have sabotaged the most important decision of our generation.

Those who love wild nature and work toward a day when humankind might inhabit this abundant planet with greater wonder, humility, and compassion, mourn the loss of a great ecological visionary - Arne Naess - who died on January 12, leaving behind...

Most people I talk to support 'sustainability' and 'social justice' goals. Ecology teaches us that we need to frame these human aspirations in relation to the biological capacity of the Earth, the energy, and the resources that support our...

A reporter from Dubai phoned last week and asked, "Can Dubai become a sustainable city?" and specifically, "Could the tourism industry be sustainable?" In the age of global warming and declining fossil fuels, the entire airline industry is...

Recently, we've been hearing about 'the death of environmentalism' because - allegedly - the world's corporations now understand ecology and will solve our problems with investment, innovation, and gung-ho optimism.

As a global community, we often appear as a dysfunctional family. We bicker constantly, the strong abuse the weak, and alleged leaders behave like addicts, unwilling to change the destructive habits that are destroying our home. As in any abusive...

Global warming is a symptom of human overshoot: the consumption and waste that exceeds the biophysical capacity of the Earth. If we attempt to reduce the fever, but ignore the disease, we will, at best, extend the suffering.

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...

Elle magazine announces that eco-friendly fashions are hip and features Stella McCartney vegan, silk dress sandals at $495, which would work well on a date in the $100,000 Tesla electric sports car. "In this epoch of global warming," declares...