One Hong Kong engineer puts the city’s surf and turf to work toward a cleaner future
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Contributors
It was the go-to soup for emperors of centuries past — a tradition revered in Chinese culture that ultimately symbolized wealth, status and prestige. But as China has gotten richer, shark fin soup consumption has increased. And with that, so has the scrutiny surrounding the issue increased, even in Asia. But as environmentalists and the [...]
For a delicacy that can command such a high price—and which has caused so much devastation in the sea—shark-fin soup is practically tasteless. I’ve only eaten it once, during a reporting trip to the industrial Chinese city of Wenzhou more than nine years ago. I was writing about the sex toy king of China—king of [...]
How do you decide which environmental issues to pursue? I know I definitely put too much store in social context: what my friends, the media, and my favorite politicians – and, embarrassingly, celebrities – are talking about. If people are talking about climate change and factory farming over lunch, then that’s got to be the [...]
Wild tigers are dying. There’s no other word for it. Their numbers have declined in the wild from perhaps 100,000 at the beginning of the 20th century, to more than 10,000 in the 1980s to less than 3,500 today. Their habitat in India, Russia, China and Southeast Asia has been carved up, their prey has [...]
It’s hard to overstate the fever for hydroelectric power that has infected southeast Asia in recent years. Hydro power has more than tripled across the region since 1980, a growth that is pinned primarily to the mighty waters of the Mekong, the huge and powerful river that winds its way from the Tibetan–Qinghai Plateau, through [...]
The conventional wisdom that Asia and the Pacific’s thousands of low-slung islands will be swimming with the fishes by the end of this century is getting a second look. A recent study of 27 Pacific islands featured in New Scientist reports that many — including the infamously doomed Tuvalu — have remained stable in size [...]
