Subjects Archives: Agriculture

The global discourse on sustainability has revolved around the need to transition towards “Sustainable Consumption” ever since it was introduced during the 1992 Earth Summit chaired by Maurice Strong, a Canadian businessman who made his wealth from the oil and gas industry.

While large polluting countries have refused to take necessary measures to slow the climate crisis, Nicaragua, one of the most vulnerable countries to climate change, has taken impressive steps to shift to more sustainable energy.

In 1974, the UN urged the world to celebrate that day on 5 June with the slogan ‘Only One Earth’; this year, the theme is ‘Ecosystem Restoration’, emphasising how the capitalist system has eroded the earth’s capacity to sustain life.

A new report from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Making Peace with Nature (2021), highlights the ‘gravity of the Earth’s triple environmental emergencies: climate, biodiversity loss, and pollution’.

Chinese cryptocurrency businesses mine two-thirds of all Bitcoin. But for how long will they remain welcome in the country?

The author explores various social, political, and cultural sites that explore and highlight the Black pastoral experience.

Centuries before the industrial revolution, the first factories transformed seafood production.

Myth, an early and enduring human technology, will always be with us, in both unconscious and conscious forms. As we now face the slow-motion collapse of the biosphere, the call for new myths is not so much an escapist alternative to concrete analysis and action as a starting point.

There is a fast increasing trend in cattle breeding towards sex semen technology which will result in birth of only female calves. 90 per cent success in ensuring success (in terms of having only female calves) is claimed by promoters of this technology.

We concur that linking land-use change science, ecology, and epidemiology is a critical step towards developing a more robust understanding of zoonotic diseases. Yet we are wary of the way the authors omit the historical specificities, political economy, and agroecological dynamics of land-use change, and their implications for disease ecologies.

To save the ocean, give property rights to the creatures living there.

After Friends of Nature director-general Zhang Boju saw his activism fail, he went another route.

JAPAN has come under fire after its government announced today that it would release more than a million metric tonnes of radioactive water from the destroyed Fukushima nuclear plant into the ocean.

On 12 August 2021, the people of Zambia will vote to elect a new president, who will be the seventh person elected to the office since Zambia won its independence from the United Kingdom in 1964 if the incumbent loses.

How England’s government-licensed pirates stole the Newfoundland fishery from Europe’s largest feudal empire.

From Haiti, Lautaro Rivara unpacks the tired trope of “poor rich Haiti,” highlighting the role of foreign capital and local elites in the destruction of life in the countryside.

As industrial agriculture encroaches into the last wild places of the Earth, it’s unleashing dangerous pathogens. Time to heal the metabolic rift between ecology and economy, suggests Rob Wallace.

While treasure fleets carried silver to Spain, far more ships were carrying men, fish and whale oil across the North Atlantic.

Every day, entrepreneurs in Brazil cut down more of the Amazon to produce cheap soybeans for animals in Europe and America. Vietnam, Indonesia and Malaysia tear up their forests to produce cheap coffee and palm oil for the world.

The world has been preoccupied with the COVID-19 pandemic, and this has also affected policymakers everywhere. There is much more recognition today of the terrible effects of underfunding public health over decades and how this affects the resilience of economies and societies.