A review of Bounding the Planetary Future: Why We Need a Great Transition by Johan Rockström. “Planetary boundaries” research constitutes an important advance in our ability to identify and quantify the components of global overshoot. Permit me to suggest that all...
Inefficient lawn irrigation is a common occurrence, and a big water waster, in western U.S. cities. Photo: Sandra Postel A few years ago, the town of Westminster, Colorado, just north of Denver, came eye-to-eye with an issue many water-conserving...
Multiple human-caused threats to the biosphere are the overarching challenge of our time. I’ve written before about the fundamentally different approaches of those who believe that solutions can be achieved within our capitalist economic system (for example, by designing products...
Deep into the California drought, possibly the worst in 1200 years, water from a property in Los Angeles flows down a residential street. Photo: Sandra Postel Denial, it’s been said, is not just a river in Egypt. It runs,...
The advent of fossil fuels changed the world profoundly (giving us everything from plastics and automobiles to global warming); the inevitable and rapidly approaching end of the oil-coal-and-gas era will likewise bring overwhelming transformation in its wake. My new...
The beginning of the Blue Nile near its outlet from Lake Tana in the highlands of Ethiopia. Photo by Ondrej Zvácek/Creative Commons Earlier this month, the foreign ministers of Sudan, Egypt and Ethiopia reached agreement on basic principles for managing what...
Recently I’ve been reading salvos in a raging debate about biological and ecological conservation. Traditionally, conservation has largely been about protecting “natural” environments by keeping human presence to a minimum. Now some observers have pointed out that there are...
The mission of UPSTREAM (formerly Product Policy Institute) is “sustainable production and consumption and good governance.” Sometimes I feel like we’re swimming against the tide in advocating a role for government action in ensuring sustainable production and consumption. Big...
Richard Heinberg discusses our renewable future and how to get there. Richard is the author of eleven books including: – Afterburn (April 2015) – Snake Oil (July 2013) – The End of Growth (August 2011) – Peak Everything: Waking...
It has been a tough couple of years in the effort to unite labor, community, and environmental groups, an alliance that has always been strained. The extractive energy sector—coal, gas, oil—has historically had strong union representation and well-paying jobs....