I try to be realistic and pragmatic. I have a lot of hope for humanity as a species, but obviously as individuals we can be extremely flawed. We may ….

If we return abruptly to a Miocene-like climate, it's reasonable to think that we would experience a lot of extinctions, and maybe even a mass extinc….

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….

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 ….

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….

There are plenty of publicly-funded organizations and nonprofits that are trying to develop GMO crops that could help feed people in developing natio….

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 ….

The fact is that humans have been shaping the genetics of what they eat for thousands of years. Genetic engineering simply speeds up the process that….

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 ….

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 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….

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….

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….

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 ….

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

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….

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….

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..

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

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….