I would want us to start our quest to survive mass extinction by rethinking how we build cities. Cities should be commonplaces of production, rather ….

We have converted huge swaths of land and ocean into human habitats where we live and grow food and harvest energy. But there's been a sea change in ….

We are headed to a radically new Earth, at least from our perspective. But from the planet's perspective, this is nothing new. As the geologist Peter….

My first goal would be to reduce the perturbation in the carbon cycle. That would mean using carbon neutral sources of energy, and changing our agric….

I believe that it's fine if the university wants to regulate, for example, bandwidth access, but they should treat the students data as private data..

To be fair, if we are having a mass extinction, we're in the early stages of it. I think it's knowing facts like that which has made me less fearful ….

Survivor species tend to have huge populations, so they can afford to lose many individuals and still survive as a species. They also tend to be smal….

Eventually, humans invented agriculture, which could be understood as a way of turning the natural world into a tool for our use. There's evidence th….

Even though I now know that it's likely the Earth will suffer through mega-volcanoes or meteor strikes that could take out millions or billions of pe….

The early Triassic was a period when the planet was recovering from the worst mass extinction it had ever known - that was the end Permian extinction….

There are definitely recurring themes in humanity's relationship with our environment. The biggest is probably adaptation, because humans are incredi….

A lot of environmental and biological science depends on technology to progress. Partly I'm talking about massive server farms that help people crunc….

I think small animals can escape from many kinds of natural disaster more easily. There are just more places for them to hide, and more ways for them….

In fact, the early demographer Thomas Malthus believes that the only way the human population would ever check itself was by running headlong into a ….

With enough money and international coordination, we can push incoming asteroids out of Earth's path. We might even be able to bring back extinct ani….

Amphibians are dying out like crazy, and frogs and salamanders may be largely extinct by the end of the twenty-first century. Imagine an animal that ….

Some time ago we discovered the carbon cycle - a long-term set of chemical reactions that govern climates based on how much carbon is free in the atm….

It's only been in the past two generations that we truly understood the impact our civilization has had on the natural world. To our credit as a spec….

GMO agriculture will probably save the world in this century. But in the developed world, where few people are haunted by the specter of famine, peop….

That said, a lot of people buy products with "green" in the brand name, but make no attempt to understand what it would really take to live sustainab….

The fact that we have been able to perturb the carbon cycle with our industrial revolution is evidence of how vulnerable we are - because when we des….