Forests are the largest terrestrial carbon sink for the planet, both from the production of tree biomass and soil carbon storage — Treebeard, some call me. Pippin: And whose side are you on? Treebeard: Side? I am on nobody’s side, because nobody is on my side, little Orc. — Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers The first ‘World Scientists Warning to Humanity’ dates back to 1992, when more than…

There is no economic metric that can completely describe the current scale of change Consider this: In 2022 Texas saw the average daily maximum statewide top 100 degrees F for the entire month of July. In the coming decades, parts of the South will see 100 degrees for 70 or…

The capital of Mississippi has no drinking water. This is not a freak occurrence. This is not the latest disaster porn movie out of Hollywood. Welcome to the new normal. The late Albert Bartlett, professor of mathematics at the Univ. of Colorado, gave a standard lecture several hundred times…

“So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart.” Each furnished with his staff and knapsack, And some provisions for the war We ventured on without conceiving, What trials lay yet before — Issachar Bates, “A Winter’s Journey to Busroe” (1811) History is all iteration…

The best carbon dioxide removal technology may be one you least expect. — This past week I passed over the swollen rivers and through the damaged landscape of Kentucky to reach the USBI Biochar and Bioenergy 2022 Conference in Morgantown, West Virginia. If you are new to biochar, or perhaps learned about it a decade ago, there is fresh science awaiting you. Besides…

We are both blessed and cursed by the genes that make us herd animals. There is no way to switch off those genes but there is a way to keep them from disuniting and destroying us. We could elevate the order and scale of our definition of tribe, for example. …

Five hundred years ago, the fortuitous combination of agroforestry and aquaculture was unbeatable. This week I donned my tall boots and waded back into our constructed wetland to restore and rebuild the chinampas. Rob Wheeler, for more than 20 years the Global Ecovillage Network representative to the UN Headquarters in…

Covid, climate and war migrants have validated the “ecovillages-as-lifeboats” metaphor. In one little body Thou counterfeit’st a bark, a sea, a wind: For still thy eyes, which I may call the sea, Do ebb and flow with tears; the bark thy body is, Sailing in this salt flood; the winds…