As a boy in the southeast African nation of Malawi, William Kamkwamba harnessed the wind.  In 2002, drought and famine — common problems in one of the world’s least-developed countries — forced the boy and his family to forage for food and water as thousands starved. Kamkwamba, however, knew if he could build a windmill…

Of all the complex wicked problems addressed by the current environmental movement, perhaps the most urgent is climate change.  The scientific community overwhelmingly agrees that ecosystems are rather vulnerable to changing climates, with a large number of species (upwards of 40%) at risk of extinction if current warming trends continue. It is well noted in…

Of all the complex wicked problems facing the biosphere today perhaps the most contentious, and ultimately the most important, is climate change. A new paper in Geophysical Research Letters  from lead author Eric Rignot at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory adds to the already substantial body of evidence that climate change poses an immediate threat to human civilization. The study notes that due…

United States Secretary of State John Kerry has been politicking through Southeast Asia the past few days. Kerry visited the Vietnam Mekong Delta, a place he knows well from his wartime adventures. US military interventionism in the region nominally passe, but there is another aspect of state violence still making headlines in the east: Environmental degradation. Kerry traveled…

The long-awaited Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2013 report is now making headlines. The report is designed to inform the global community about the current state of climate science — the scientific debate, consensus and (most importantly) data. We will learn of the latest scientific projections of temperature increase, sea level rise and extremes in weather. The report is seven…