Category: Environment and Conservation

  • By Jacy Reese | One roadblock that is probably slowing down mainstream acceptance of plant-based products, even artisan ones, is labeling. When the California Department of Public Health inspected Schinner’s production facility, the agent saw that the product was labeled only according to flavor, such as Aged English Fresh Farmhouse. It couldn’t be categorized as…

  • By Philip Warburg | For all their ideological differences, progressives and conservatives share an aversion to dealing with global population growth. Progressives commonly argue that privileged white people from the Global North shouldn’t meddle in the reproductive politics of poorer nations. To many in this camp, efforts to slow population growth conjure up past coercive…

  • By Adam Eichen | “You can love two children at once,” a colleague once told me. He meant that advocates for a single issue can integrate other reform efforts into their agenda without being subsumed—and are often more powerful for it. In my work promoting democracy reform I’ve repeated this message hundreds of times across…

  • By Dina Gilio-Whitaker | For many years now I have been studying, writing, and thinking about what environmental justice means for Indigenous peoples. In my most recent book, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice From Colonization to Standing Rock, I take on the topic in very broad but specific ways. I…

  • By Philip Warburg | Faced with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest report, some environmental leaders are all too ready to toss a lifeline to aging, uneconomic nuclear power plants. The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), long venerated as America’s most rigorous nuclear watchdog group, joined this chorus in early November.

  • A Q&A with Jacy Reese Anthis | First is the scale and ubiquity of suffering on factory farms. Over 100 billion animals are in the food system, and over 90% live on factory farms. That figure is over 99% in the US, based on USDA farm size data and the EPA’s definition of a Concentrated…

  • By Jacy Reese | Few buzzwords are more important in food marketing than “natural.” It’s been applied to everything from Cheetos to Minute Maid with high fructose corn syrup. Yet despite its meaninglessness, fifty-nine percent of shoppers say they regularly check for the label. When it comes to meat, the situation is pretty crappy—in one…

  • The deadline is 2030. By then, if we don’t do everything in our power to curb the causes of global warming, it’ll be too late. The world’s leading climate scientists issued this warning in a report at the latest UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Among the worst-case scenarios forecast in the report are inundated…

  • By Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce | “We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them…

  • By Marcus Eriksen | On the table were familiar objects from Kamilo Beach, Hawaii: degraded toys, bottles and caps, glow sticks, small net fl oats, and pieces of crates with Chinese characters on them, arranged in glass cases like museum artifacts. “Do you know this place?” Sophie asked.