In the days before Amazon Prime, your Christmas gift-giving options were somewhat more limited. So it that the three wise men in the Biblical account brought local gifts to the baby Jesus in Bethlehem: gold, frankincense and …
wildlife
Winning the Conservation War: How to Manage the World We’re Stuck With
I have a Going Green column over on the Time.com mainpage today, and it’s a review of a new collection of essays called Love Your Monsters: Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene. Readers of this blog are probably familiar …
The DMZ After Kim: What Change in North Korea Could Mean for One of the World’s Richest Wildlife Refuges
No one knows what will follow the apparent death of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il. The Hermit Kingdom remains a black box to experts—especially Americans—and while early reports suggest that Kim’s third son Kim Jong-un …
Free Boris: Over 100 Beluga Whales Trapped in Russian Ice
Bad news for whales out of the Russian Far East: over 100 belugas are reportedly trapped in water between ice floes in the Chukotka region, cut off from the sea. Fishermen in the area—one of the poorest in Russia, bordering the …
Blood Money: Tsunami Recovery Funds Go to Japan’s Whaling Industry
Our Krista Mahr has a post over at Global Spin on news that nearly $30 million worth of Japanese post-tsunami aid is going to the country’s controversial whaling industry. Ironically, one of the (few) positive effects of the …
Life in the Time of the Great Dying
Earth history is different from ordinary history: it’s much harder to nail down specific dates when everything happened millions of years ago and over huge, slow timescales. But it can be done, as shown by paleontologists who …
Stopping Bushmeat Is Good for Conservation—and Bad for Hunger
I wrote a piece recently for the paper magazine—sadly behind the paymoat—on the viral ecologist Nathan Wolfe. Wolfe’s Global Viral Forecasting group has set up research teams in hotspots around the world—places like central …
Why Coke Is Going White for Polar Bears
The 125-year-old Coca-Cola Company doesn’t like to mess with its brand image. That’s in part because it’s so valuable—according to Interbrand Coke has the best brand in the world—but also because previous efforts to tweak its image haven’t always worked out so well, and sometimes lead to things like this.
So perhaps it’s a …
How Climate Change May Shrink Species
The people of Soay Island, off the west coast of Scotland, have notice something strange. Over the years, their sheep have begun to shrink, as I wrote in 2009:
Why? In short, because of climate change. Generally, the sheep’s life cycle goes like this: they fatten up on grass during the fertile, sunny summer; then the harsh winter
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Taking Shark-Fin Soup Off the Menu
For a delicacy that can command such a high price—and which has caused so much devastation in the sea—shark-fin soup is practically tasteless. I’ve only eaten it once, during a reporting trip to the industrial Chinese city of Wenzhou more than nine years ago. I was writing about the sex toy king of China—king of manufacturing …