Richard Conniff – New Green Challenge: How to Grow More Food on Less Land

For researchers trying to figure how to feed a world of 10 billion people later in this century, the great objective over the past decade has been to achieve what they call “sustainable intensification.” It’s an awkward term, not least because of conventional agricultural intensification’s notorious record of wasting water, overusing fertilizers and pesticides, and polluting habitats. But the ambition …

Terms of debate: Destroying vs altering nature, the fragile vs the resilient Earth – Kurt Cobb

Last week’s piece drew responses that throw into relief how much the language we use depends on our most basic assumptions about how the world works. If left unexamined, that language leads to further conclusions that go unchallenged because the underlying assumptions are never scrutinized. I challenged the Breakthrough Institute’s notion that humans are in one category and nature in another. If one …