Environment

Leyla Acaroglu writes: Americans replace their cellphones every 22 months, junking some 150 million old phones in 2010 alone. Ever wondered what happens to all these old phones? The answer isn’t pretty. In far-flung, mostly impoverished places like Agbogbloshie, Ghana; Delhi, India; and Guiyu, China, children pile e-waste into giant mountains and burn it so [...]

A new scientific study links the use of Roundup — the most popular herbicide used worldwide, manufactured by Monsanto and used in conjunction with Roundup-ready GMO crops whose derivatives can be found in most processed foods — with “most of the diseases and conditions associated with a Western diet, which include gastrointestinal disorders, obesity, diabetes, [...]

BBC News reports: The UK government should suspend the use of a number of pesticides linked to the deaths of bees, a committee of MPs has said. Members of the Commons Environmental Audit Committee are calling for a moratorium on the use of sprays containing neonicotinoids. Britain has refused to back an EU ban on [...]

Interview with James K Boyce, author of Economics, the Environment and Our Common Wealth: Part Three: Part Two: Part One:

Yale Environment 360: University of Kansas insect ecologist Orley R. “Chip” Taylor has been observing the fragile populations of monarch butterflies for decades, but he says he has never been more concerned about their future. Monarchs are beloved for their spectacular migration across Canada and the United States to overwintering sites in central Mexico — [...]

National Geographic: Mahogany is the crown jewel of the Amazon, soaring in magnificent buttressed columns high into the forest canopy. Its rich, red grain and durability make it one of the most coveted building materials on Earth, favored by master craftsmen, a symbol of wealth and power. A single tree can fetch tens of thousands [...]

The mealy-mouthed, equivocating, spineless New York Times reports on the devastating loss in bee populations caused by what is termed “colony collapse disorder.” The insidious feature of this report is that while it highlights the magnitude of the problem, it implies that concern about the dangers from pesticides is prevalent mostly among beekeepers — as [...]

The New York Times reports: Bright objects, apparently debris from a meteor, streaked through the sky in western Siberia early on Friday, accompanied by a boom that damaged buildings across a vast territory. Russia’s Interior Ministry said more than 1,000 people were hurt, 200 of them children, mostly from shards of glass that shattered when [...]

Maywa Montenegro and Terry Glavin write: This past January [2008], at the St. Innocent Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Anchorage, Alaska, friends and relatives gathered to bid their last farewell to Marie Smith Jones, a beloved matriarch of her community. At 89 years old, she was the last fluent speaker of the Eyak language. In May [...]

To see a world in a grain of sand And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour. Thus William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence begins. The same insight — that in the smallest things we can discover the significance of life — has now [...]

Charles Eisenstein writes: The great historian Lewis Mumford once described a patent as “a device that enables one man to claim special financial rewards for being the last link in the complicated social process that produced the invention”. He was pointing out that we do not produce inventions ex nihilo, but rather draw on the [...]