More On the Ground
As the last block of concrete was pulled from the riverbed, the Elwha River in the Olympic Mountains of Washington State flowed freely for the first time in over 100 years. The river was historically one of the most productive salmon streams for its size in the Pacific Northwest. Four hundred thousand salmon once swam its length each year but, in the century since the dam’s construction, that number had fallen to a few thousand.1...
Since the late 1990s, Australian farmer Colin Seis has been successfully planting a cereal crop into perennial pasture on his sheep farm during the dormant period using no-till drilling, a method that uses a drill to sow seeds instead of the traditional plow. He calls it pasture cropping and he gains two crops this way from one parcel of land—a cereal crop for food or forage and wool or lamb meat from his pastures—which means its...
“Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful.”
George E. P. Box and Norman Richard Draper, Empirical Model-Building and Response Surfaces
Since its emergence as a concept in 1997, there have been many efforts to internalize the idea of environmental services and transform theory into practice. This story will recount this important environmental concept’s evolution into...
In 1985 the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) designated two world heritage sites in the tiny, mountainous province of Assam in northeastern India. UNESCO had sweeping ambitions to conserve the region's rich ecosystem of tigers, one-horned rhinos, elephants, wild buffalo, and swamp deer. The Kaziranga National Park lay on Assam’s alluvial floodplains along the Brahmaputra River, while Manas...
Before the drought, Mohammad and his family would have been considered wealthy in their hometown near Kismayo, in southern Somalia. They had a farm and livestock, including 150 cattle and 60 goats. But as the months turned into years with no rain, their animals started to die. Some villages hadn’t seen rain in four years.
In an area currently controlled by Al Shabaab, the Islamist group that dominates much of southern Somalia,...
Last March, a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and subsequent tsunami left nearly 20,000 dead or missing and destroyed 125,000 buildings in the Tohoku region of Japan. The two disasters also caused three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant to melt down, which released dangerous levels of radiation into surrounding areas and led to national power shortages. Tokyo’s iconic neon signs were switched off as rolling blackouts...
We are standing on the knife’s edge of a ridge in Oregon’s rugged Coast Range, peering down into a steep draw with a gurgling creek at the bottom. The hillside, pockmarked with tree stumps, also bears a patchy covering of shrubs and soft-stemmed plants: evergreen huckleberry, Oregon grape, Ceanothus, bracken fern, trailing blackberry, beargrass. Among them, tiny conifer seedlings unfurl their tips into the sunshine.
Bisecting this...
Mongolia is the country of endless plains and eternal blue skies. Eighty percent of the land area is covered by grassland, giving home to about 35 million horses, cattle, sheep, goats, and camels. Half of the country’s population of 2.7 million depends on livestock production, which contributes more than 20 percent of the country’s GDP.1 More than these numbers can tell, nomadic pastoralism is a way of life. For centuries, herders have...
Legend has it that the Stephens Island wren was the only species driven to extinction by a single living creature. The culprit? A cat named Tibbles, a pet belonging to Stephens Island lighthouse keeper David Lyall. The wren was endemic to New Zealand and was one of the world’s only known species of flightless songbird. The story goes that, between the time the Stephens Island wren was first discovered on Lyall’s doorstep in 1894 and...
Twice a year, hundreds of millions of birds make a treacherous and grueling migration from Europe or Asia to Africa and then back again. After thousands of kilometers of continuous flight over sprawling desert, migratory birds, exhausted and near starvation, stop to rest in Israel’s Eilat region, a crucial land bridge separating Europe from Asia and Africa. Surrounded by desert, Eilat’s marshlands are the only place where these birds...
I paid a high price to learn about the connections between women, security, and the environment. In June of 2004, 15 months after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, I was appointed the country’s first minister for the environment. Shortly afterward, I survived a suicide car bombing, where four of my bodyguards died. Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for the attack, stressing that “their arrow will not miss me next time.” Moreover, Musab Al...
When overfishing led to the collapse of what was once the most important hard clam (a.k.a. northern quahog) fishery in the United States, a way of life and more than 6,000 jobs were lost. Worse, harmful growths of brown tide algae became chronic in the absence of the clam’s water filtration services, seriously altering the ecosystem of Great South Bay, New York, to the detriment of fish, wildlife, and people. It is an all too familiar...
On a sunny Tuesday afternoon, January 12, 2010, just before five o’clock, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake hit Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The quake destroyed more than 280,000 buildings in the metropolitan area, killed perhaps 230,000 people within the first 72 hours, injured more than 300,000, and displaced more than 1 million. Some smaller towns to the southwest, particularly the coastal town of Leogane, were estimated to have lost 90 percent...
The face of India’s rural malaise can be seen in the Bull's trench brick kilns that are widespread across the country. An outdated technology invented by a British engineer, they contribute 30 percent of the air pollution in the Kathmandu valley.1 The kilns, many of them illegal, dot the countryside, belching smoke, sucking up coal, creating drudgework for which people are poorly paid, and causing respiratory infections in workers and...
In the Appalachian mountain region, the loss of the American chestnut, along with the visible scars of coal-related surface mining, have had a doubly devastating effect. However, it is in viewing these two ecological disasters together that the possibility of a solution emerges.
King of the Forest
The forests of eastern North America were once home to the American chestnut, a hardwood species so large that it came to be known as the “...
The winter night at latitude 65 degrees North is long, cold, and very dark. But the inhabitants of a small island of black volcanic rocks and white glaciers rarely pay much attention to discomfort—they sit warm and cozy in geothermally heated, brightly lit houses. The occasional earthquake or volcanic outburst rocks the island, but the inhabitants are not terribly worried; they've learned to make use of their country's power.
In 1937,...
For a country that responded to severe energy crisis by switching to organic, localized agriculture, the fruits of the revolution must be protected from the coming peace.
For those trying to imagine life without oil, Cuba has proven the solitary example of a country successfully de-industrializing.
Confronted with the collapse of aid from the Soviet Union and ever-tighter U.S. sanctions in the early 1990s, the Castro regime was forced...
I am a bicycle-mom. My own and all other children's futures drive me in my work as a freelance journalist, author, and lecturer. That is why I cycle. That is why I buy vintage clothes and talk about that fact on stage in my lectures. That is why I sit on the Malmö Fairtrade City steering group. That is why I am staying in Malmö after having moved around to several continents in my professional life. Malmö has changed from being a gray...
