Climate change is no longer an abstraction. I can literally see it at my front door. My figs ripened in October 2024, which has never happened before as it was never warm enough during that month. In my home state of Oregon, wildfires set...

Fresh water is critical to the survival of ecosystems and living beings worldwide. However, as much as we all depend on water, some industries are notorious for their unsustainable water usage and rising contribution to water pollution. Factory farms are a prime offender. ...

What led humans on the unique path of cultural development? And can we do anything useful with newly reconstructed histories of this process? ...

There is a great deal of attention in modern societies to inequality and the social problems it causes. Often inequality is considered to be the unavoidable consequence of how society operates in many cultures, with large population numbers and competition for resources requiring a...

The immigration issue has split and/or weakened both center and left parties and movements across many nations in recent years. Serious economic and social problems afflicting national working classes have been “managed”—at least temporarily—by scapegoating immigrants as if they were responsible for those problems. Leaders...

In thousands of ways, we are taught to accept the world we live in as the only possible one, but thousands of other ways of organizing homes, cities, schools, societies, economies, and cosmologies have existed and could exist. ...

People think they know lots about chickens, and you’d think they would: There are four living chickens for every living person in the world—and since chickens are domestic fowl (a separate subspecies from their wild ancestor, the red jungle fowl of Southeast Asia), all...

Often referred to as the most segregated city in the U.S. by media outlets like WBEZ Chicago and 14East, Chicago, Illinois, is riddled with redlining and racial profiling. A May 2024 report by a team of United Nations experts outlined...

The 2024 U.S. presidential election was framed as a crucial test for the nation’s political system, with ongoing concerns over oligarchy, mob rule, a breakdown of equal protection under the law, and the ultimate power of citizens to determine the fate of the nation. ...

A free-flowing river supports abundant fish and wildlife, provides drinking water, and other intangible recreational benefits. But humans have sought to block rivers with dams for millennia. While dams have provided benefits like hydroelectricity and water storage, they have also been ecologically disastrous. Besides...