Faith Kearns, University of California, Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources
A scientist dips her toe into a new form of group-based performance art: devising new words to describe new feelings and phenomena of a rapidly changing world.
Science explains how people are changing our natural systems, but we need to recognize the importance – and power – of emotions and the spiritual world in charting a course to the future.
Green planet: tropical rainforests have produced more growth in response to rising carbon dioxide.
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Flickr
Fire has played a vital role in human history, and will continue to. Recent advances in fusion herald the freeing of fire from captivity back into its natural form.
We need other species to survive for the services they provide and the knowledge they can share.
Global Environment Facility
Quentin Wheeler, State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry
The presidential candidates should be talking about exploring and cataloguing our biosphere, which holds vital clues for how humanity should navigate the future.
We don’t need future geological evidence to tell us nuclear tests are bad.
US Department of Defense
Human activities have altered whole ecosystems with declines in species diversity, extinctions and the introduction of weeds and pests. But it’s not just the outside world we’re harming.
Places near the equator, with less natural climate variation, were the first to see humanity’s climate fingerprint.
Husond/Wikimedia Commons
Global warming is, by definition, experienced worldwide. But a new study shows that the tropics were the first places on earth where the human effect on climate outstripped normal climate variations.
Thylacines are extinct - and perhaps we just have to accept it.
Wikimedia
Many ecosystems have changed so radically that it is no longer possible to restore them to what they once were and in other situations it is not appropriate.
Wildlife corridors: four proposals to ‘rewild’ portions of North America.
Smithsonian Institute
The pope’s encyclical turns climate change into a moral discussion by focusing on the disproportionate impact of climate change on poor countries and regions.
Hold on: before we bring dinosaurs back to life as in Jurassic World, we need to look at other extinct critters first.
Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment
Jurassic World is opening in cinemas this Thursday and again raises the idea of resurrecting extinct creatures. But there’s plenty of other contenders before we even think of recreating dinosaurs.
Chimpanzees are wily enough to adapt in some ways when people encroach on their turf.
Kimberley Hockings
Apes and people are sharing habitat more than ever. As apes are pushed into novel situations, we can see how they adapt and maybe find clues into early human evolution.
Can we take responsibility for an increasingly human-driven planet? (Photo by Mark Klett)
Witness to Sunrise, Muley Point, Utah.
Scientists, philosophers, historians, journalists, agency administrators and activists grapple with what it means to ‘save nature’ in the Anthropocene.
Digging for dollars: an new way to view economic growth.
money growing via www.shutterstock.com
The Anthropocene, as an epoch of human-driven planetary change, poses huge environmental and political problems. But it could also force us to develop proper ecological and democratic accountability.
An iconic photo - Earthrise taken by Apollo 8 astronauts in 1968 - reflects how humans must now think of managing the Earth as a whole system.
NASA
Allan and Helaine Shiff Curator of Climate Change, Royal Ontario Museum and Assistant Professor, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Toronto