“What permaculturists are doing is the most important activity that any group is doing on the planet.” – David Suzuki A Brief History of Agriculture Before we look at what the future might look like we need to understand how we got to where we are before we can move in the appropriate direction for a…

Liz Barratt-Brown, Senior Advisor, Washington, DC Today, the Global Forest Watch program of the World Resources Institute (WRI) and Global Forest Watch Canada released maps of forest loss in the tar sands region of Alberta, in the heart of Canada’s Boreal forest.  These maps make very clear how prevalent the forest loss is in and…

John Walke, Clean Air Director/ Senior Attorney, Washington, D.C. Twenty-one states have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to terminate health safeguards that protect Americans from toxic air pollution spewed by electric power plants burning coal and oil. Attorneys general from these conservative states want to overturn a lower court decision that upheld clean air standards projected to save…

Peter Lehner, Executive Director, New York City I stepped off the train at Grand Central last Thursday, along with tens of thousands of other commuters, and ran right into a lavish display from Bayer, the giant chemical company. Part of the glitzy setup, which took up a good bit of valuable Manhattan real estate, was…

A study recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) found that at least 88 percent of the Earth’s ocean surface is polluted with plastic debris. (1) The study was conducted by researchers from the University of Cadiz, Spain as well as the University of Western Australia. These findings obviously raise very large…

HESHAN China (Reuters) – Xiong Demin could not have foreseen that the mine he worked at for 32 years would leave his home village poisoned and hundreds of residents, including himself and his wife, stricken with cancer. The 71-year-old retired mechanic and his wife, Wen Jin’e, both suffer from cancer, which they blame on arsenic pollution left by the mining and processing of realgar, also…

By Gernot Wagner Receding beach on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Source: FEMA/Tim Burkitt (This blog originally appeared on EDF Voices) This blog post was co-authored by Jonathan Camuzeaux. Put Republican Hank Paulson, Independent Mike Bloomberg, and Democrat Tom Steyer together, and out comes one of the more unusual – and unusually impactful – climate reports. This…