On February 4, 2025, Chicago’s business community pushed back against Mayor Brandon Johnson’s proposal to raise real estate transfer taxes, adding to the city’s ongoing economic struggles. ...

Over more than a thousand years, Venice transformed from a modest refuge into a dominant Mediterranean power. Despite various crises and encircling empires, the Venetian Republic avoided foreign rule, revolution, and collapse. ...

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...

Empires historically possessed a unique ability to organize diversity and successfully rule over people quite different from one another. The national states that succeeded them in Europe were organized on the basis of nationality (real or imagined) where diversity in language, ethnicity, or religion was...

Considering whether modern states are empires tells us almost nothing useful about either modern states or empires. A better question is what policies and structures pioneered by empires are still employed by states today, and how. ...

Since the turn of the century, there has been a consistent average annual loss of 3 to 4 million hectares (7.4 to 9.9 million acres) of tropical forest globally. This puts us far from reaching the goal of zero deforestation by 2030, a...

In a global context where tropical rainforests play a critical role in biodiversity conservation and climate regulation, these ecosystems are severely threatened by expanding agribusiness and logging activities. This poses significant risks to the environment, wildlife, and communities dependent on rainforests. ...

On December 3, 2019, the Pacific island state of Vanuatu made an audacious proposal: Make ecocide—the destruction of nature—an international crime. “An amendment of the Rome Statute could criminalize acts that amount to Ecocide,” stated Ambassador of Vanuatu John Licht at the International...

Renewable energy comes from matter that nature produces and replenishes constantly. The power generated through this source does not significantly threaten the environment, especially in comparison with fossil fuels, such as coal, oil, and natural gas, which take more than millions of years to

With the planet teetering on the brink of climate disaster and the goal of achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 rapidly slipping away, the need for alternatives to pollutive fossil fuels has never been more evident. Should nuclear power be one of...