Ecology and Environment

Chris Dickman of the University of Sydney said “without any doubt at all” the animal death toll has exceeded one billion. By Jake Johnson, staff writer – Common Dreams As Australia’s catastrophic wildfires rage on with no end in sight,…

These are dark times politically. But amid the gloom, there are real sources of hope in Israel-Palestine — not least all the people fighting to make it a better place. By Haggai Matar Here’s a new year’s resolution: I want…

Economists used to admire scientists. Now they ignore them at our peril. Katherine Trebeck for openDemocracy Back in the 1800s, scholars in the field of economics cast an envious glance at their colleagues in science. They envied physics, with its…

Being a universal city, any conflict happening somewhere on the planet usually ends up on New York’s streets. During the year we have been covering some of them, but while working on this article we were surprised by the scale…

Heather Alberro, Nottingham Trent University; Dénes Csala, Lancaster University; Hannah Cloke, University of Reading; Marc Hudson, University of Manchester; Mark Maslin, UCL, and Richard Hodgkins, Loughborough University for The Conversation The climate breakdown continues. Over the past year, The Conversation…

The Amazon rainforest is a crucial life-support ecosystem. Without its wondrous strength and power to generate hydrologic systems across the sky (as far north as Iowa), absorb and store carbon (CO2), and its miraculous life-giving endless supply of oxygen, civilization…

Could degrowth, community, and basic income create a sane economy? An interview with one of the godfathers of the basic income movement, Phillippe Van Parijs. Philippe Van Parijs for openDemocracy-Beyond traffic and slavery. Phillippe Van Parijs is a philosopher at…

Five years ago: Nations of the world met in Paris to draft a climate agreement that was subsequently accepted by nearly every country in the world, stating that global temperatures must not exceed +2C pre-industrial. Global emissions must be cut!…

By Farhana Haque Rahman By any measure this has been a devastating year: fires across the Amazon, the Arctic and beyond; floods and drought in Africa; rising temperatures, carbon emissions and sea levels; accelerating loss of species, and mass forced…

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, it is estimated that the total number of passenger pigeons in the United States was about three billion birds. The bird was immensely abundant, as illustrated by this passage written by the famous…