Perspectives
An offbeat, refreshing look at solutions brought to you by the business leaders and academics, policy makers and designers who are in the field.
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On a cool day last December, the eminent Swedish scientist Johan Rockström stood in front of a large audience at the European Parliament in Brussels and pleaded his case. “This is what we could call ‘the scientist’s nightmare,’” Rockström said. “We have disturbed the energy balance to the point where we are committed to three degrees warming. We have reached the sixth mass extinction of species on planet Earth—the first one to be caused by humans.” Rockström elaborated on his seminal 2009 Nature paper: “Suffice it to say that it’s not only climate change [we need to worry about], but we should be equally preoccupied with the interlinked issues of nitrogen, phosphorus, biodiversity, freshwater, land.”1
In the Nature paper, Rockström and coauthors argued that...
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In 2010 David Letterman asked Hollywood actress Salma Hayek if she routinely eats bugs. “Look,” she responded. “I'm salivating! They’re delicious!”
Insect eating, officially called entomophagy, is an age-old custom found throughout the world and often considered standard dietary practice. Nearly 2,000 species of insects are eaten by approximately 2.5 billion people worldwide.1,2
We come from a long line of bug eaters. Our earliest primate ancestors were insectivores, and our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees, make rudimentary tools to fish termites out of narrow tunnels in their mounds. Among the laws of Leviticus codified by the Israelites millennia ago is permission to eat “the locust after its kind, and the bald locust after its kind, and...
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Meet the Perspective Authors
Marketing professor and director of the Center for the Market Diffusion of Renewable Energy and Clean Technology at the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business at Utah State University
Marketing professor and director of the Center for the Market Diffusion of Renewable Energy and Clean Technology at the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business at Utah State University
Director, Centre for Social Responsibility in Mining at the University of Queensland, Australia
Other Perspectives
A four-year-old arrives at school and starts crying when she realizes her lunch is packed in a generic plastic bag, not the usual Disney Princess lunchbox she so loves. A friend tells her she won’t be able to sit at the princess lunch...
Improved cookstoves ought to be one of the easy wins in global health. Inefficient, old-fashioned cookstoves do real damage to human health and family incomes. Traditional cookstoves are generally open fires in the middle of three stones,...
What comes to mind when you think about green communities? I find many people think about technology—solar panels, wind turbines, or rapid public transit. Another important pillar of green communities is action: the actions people take...
2010 was a rough year on the Mongolian steppe for the country’s herders. That year, an extremely cold winter struck, known locally as a dzud, wiping out 9 million animals, or 20 percent of the national herd in a country where livestock...
When countries crash, a natural thing for their inhabitants to do, inter alia, is inspect their legal and constitutional foundation to look for latent flaws and to fix them.
—Thorvaldur Gylfason1
The Post-Collapse Scene: Pots-and-Pans...
Fossil fuels, including natural gases, coal, and crude oil, play an enormous role in development, directly affecting the lifestyles of every single individual across the globe as well as impacting the energy systems and economies that they...
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Exploring solutions presented in our special July/August issue on Appalachia
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Bowdoin College's Phil Camill offers a fresh perspective to the issues surrounding environmental change.
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