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I wrote a piece recently for the paper magazine—sadly behind the paymoat—on the viral ecologist Nathan Wolfe. Wolfe’s Global Viral Forecasting group has set up research teams in hotspots around the world—places like central Africa, China and Southeast Asia—where animal diseases are likely to cross over to human beings. That spillover has seeded most of [...]
For several years now, a few academics have been fighting a civil war over the possible effects of climate and global warming on, well, civil war. In 2009 Marshall Burke, an economist at the University of California-Berkeley, co-authored a paper arguing that higher temperatures increased the risk of civil conflict—and that the warming predicted by [...]
As I’ve written before, the devastating famine in Somalia—which has killed tens of thousands in the Horn of Africa—may have been triggered by the worst drought in the region in 60 years, but it’s ultimately a manmade disaster. The ongoing insurgency in Somalia prevented food aid from reaching those in desperate need, and now the [...]
The word ‘famine’ may be a familiar one, but it is not thrown around lightly by the people who decide when there is one. The fact that most of us today probably associate the term with the 1984 crisis in Ethiopia is testament to its exceedingly careful dispensation; to use it too often would dilute [...]
Another day, another global report on the world’s land use. This time a wide-ranging survey from the International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO)—an intergovernmental body that promotes the sustainable use of forest resources—has revealed that the area of the world’s tropical forests that are under some form of sustainable management has increased 50% since 2005, from [...]
Pencil in October 31, 2011 on your calendar. It’s not just the one day of the year you get to dress like Edward Cullen without everyone thinking there’s something deeply wrong with you. According to the United Nations Population Division (UNPD)—the demographers who rule over all demographers—that’s the day when the 7 billionth person on [...]
GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons ignited an Internet firestorm when he uploaded a video of himself hunting and killing an elephant in Zimbabwe. What video? That would be this one: So is Parsons sorry for the elephant hunt—or at the very least, sorry that he put it up on the Internet? Absolutely not, as an uncontrite [...]
UPDATE, 3 p.m. Thursday: GoDaddy competitor Namecheap has launched a campaign to woo away offended GoDaddy customers. Our colleagues at Techland have the full story: Switch business now, and Namecheap is offering to make elephant donations on your behalf. We all shoot vacation videos, but most of us choose to keep them to ourselves — [...]
The story of the world’s forests is usually a depressing one. Tropical rain forests are under pressure in South America, Asia and Africa, threatening habitat for countless species and adding billions of tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere every year. But while the headlines can be scary, the reality is that the world may [...]
I have a piece on the home page today about the persistent problem of energy poverty in the developing world. We know that the poorest countries of Africa, Asia and South America are held back by diseases like HIV and TB, along with lack of education and infrastructure. But a major part of what keeps [...]
