Quaint cobblestone towns and green pastures dot the Pyrenees Mountains, at the gates of Catalonia’s Aigüestortes i Estany de Sant Maurici National Park. Hike a few miles into the park, though, and the Spanish landscape of trickling rivers and montane meadows looks relatively untouched by people. Visit almost any national park, and it’s a similar story, with tourist towns, farms, and other development lapping at the edges of conserved lands. But just how much does the landscape change at these fringes over time compared with the protected areas?

In what is likely the first study to look at how dietary preferences evolved across the animal kingdom, UA researchers looked at more than a million species, going back 800 million years. The team reports several unexpected discoveries, including that the first animal likely was a carnivore and that humans, along with other omnivores, belong to a rare breed.

California governor Jerry Brown said he will approve a ban on single-use plastic bags, in what would make the western US state the first to outlaw them. Lawmakers passed the bill late last Friday, and it now only requires Brown's signature to pass into law. The governor must do so before the end of September.

Last week’s discussion of externalities—costs of doing business that get dumped onto the economy, the community, or the environment, so that those doing the dumping can make a bigger profit—is, I’m glad to say, not the first time this issue has been raised recently.

Two news stories and an op-ed piece in the media in recent days provide a useful introduction to the theme of this week’s post here on The Archdruid Report. The first news story followed the official announcement that the official unemployment rate here in the United States dropped to 5.5% last month. This was immediately hailed by pundits and politicians as proof that the recession we weren’t in is over at last, and the happy days that never went away are finally here again...

Richard Heinberg

This is a beautiful video of what happens to astronauts when they return to Earth. It was done by Planetary Collective, a group of filmmakers, visual media creatives and thinkers who work with cosmologists, ecologists and philosophers to explore some … Continue reading →

If you’re like most Atlanteans these days, you’ve heard all sorts of unnerving claims about the future of our continent. Some people are even saying that recent earth tremors are harbingers of a cataclysm that will plunge Atlantis to the bottom of the sea. Those old prophecies from the sacred scrolls...

Hidden in an unknown corner of China is a toxic, nightmarish lake created by our thirst for smartphones, gadgets and green tech, discovers Tim Maughan.

Brazil has waged a successful war on tropical deforestation, and other countries are trying to follow its lead. But victory remains fragile.

Michael Tennesen’s book looks ahead to the dusty, thirsty future of Las Vegas and other regions on Earth

Scientists say a chemical used to cleanup the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill could have caused health problems, but BP denies it.

For the first time, complex organic molecules that are potential precursors to some building blocks of life have been spotted in the protoplanetary disk surrounding another star.

In 1909, a United States Forest Service officer named Aldo Leopold shot a mother wolf from a perch of rimrock in the Apache National Forest in Arizona. It was a revelatory moment in the life of the young naturalist. “In those days we never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf,” Leopold wrote in an essay...

Restoring an ancient canal network could halve the Peruvian capital's water deficit at a fraction of a cost of building a desalination plant

It occurred to me the other day that quite a few of the odder features of contemporary American culture make perfect sense if you assume that everybody knows exactly what’s wrong and what’s coming as our society rushes, pedal to the metal, toward its face-first collision with the brick wall of the future. It’s not that they don’t get it; they get it all too clearly, and they just wish that those of us on the fringes...

Tropical fish in Alaska, stranded sea lions and more thunderstorms across the US Pacific coast have all been linked to an unusual blob of warm water...

Taken together, the two new studies are particularly chilling.

Important changes have been made since 2010, but the oil and gas industry has not learned from the historic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico