Nature

“Alter do Chão has a history of being a matriarchal village,” Neca explains. “If you did a survey here, you’d see that 70 percent of households are run by women.” Dona Lusia never married. “She never let herself be subjugated by a man,” her daughter says. “She raised us all on her own.”Dona Lusia occupied a position of importance when it came to communal ceremonies, cooking, rituals, craftwork, and storytelling. Neca says her mother was both festive and a fighter. Rituals are part of the intense life of these people, and…

Southern Company headquarters in Atlanta.Photo: Kristoffer Tripplaar Sipa (AP)One of the largest and most profitable electric utility companies in the U.S. knew about climate change for decades and yet continued to build fossil fuel facilities while funding groups that contribute to climate misinformation, a report released Wednesday has found.Executives at Southern Company, which serves 9 million customers across six states, had been involved in discussions about the impact of carbon dioxideon the atmosphere as early as…

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Places to play outdoors for children are increasingly located in the built-up environment and often look gray, with few natural elements. However, nature can add something, especially in outdoor play areas where children can release their energy. This was observed by researchers from Radboud University in a study where more than 1,500 primary school pupils were asked to draw and analyze their…

A mountain meadow in Summit County, Colorado in 2021.Photo: JASON CONNOLLY/AFP (Getty Images)Colorado is going to become hotter, dryer, and a lot less skiable in just a few decades, according to new research.The study, published in Earth and Space Science, used climate models to forecast the future of snow in Colorado, finding that the state is set to lose 50% to 60% of its snow by 2080, thanks to climate change-related drought conditions. Nearby states Wyoming and Utah are also likely tobecome less snowy and more arid,…

Once upon a time there was no time at all. And no weight, no mass, no height, no volume. None of the gauges and instruments we use to make sense of the world around us existed. They hadn’t been invented yet. And although the physical properties measurements refer to existed before the names humans coined to describe them, James Vincent notes in Beyond Measure, the point at which people developed systems to quantify the physical world around them was a moment of transformation for our species. Thirty-two thousand years…

Photo: Milos Bicanski (Getty Images)Wildfires have been wreaking havoc over the past few weeks, as several fires—like the Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak Fire in New Mexico—continue to burn. Greece is currently battling another wildfire that began on Saturday in the area surrounding Athens, and it is only one of the 61 different wildfires that were active in Greece on Saturday,according to Deputy Climate Crisis and Civil Protection Minister Evangelos Tournas, who was quoted in AP News.The official cause of the fire has not been…

The ramifications of the historic megadrought happening in the U.S. right now are getting increasingly serious. Hydropower is faltering, farmland is too parched to produce, and millions of people are currently under water restrictions. It’s a drought so big that it has eclipsed 1,200 years of climate history. Human-caused climate change is at least partially responsible.Fields Lay FallowCalifornia is the U.S.’s produce aisle. The state grows more than a third of the country’s domestically harvested vegetables and two-…

We are farming our planet to death. Half of the world’s habitable land has already been colonised to produce our food. Nature, the many millions of other species, is forced to survive in the polluted, overhunted, degraded fragments of what remains. Extinction rates are around 1,000 times the natural background rate, largely because wild land has been lost to agriculture or polluted by it, or because of conflict with farmers. In spite of it all, around 800 million people go hungry, with 150 million children under five…

To understand the current state of Web3—that future version of the internet that proponents promise will be decentralized and better—it helps to take a look at Adam Neumann and the “Goddess Nature Token.”Mr. Neumann is, of course, the former head of WeWork who in 2019 was ousted from the company he co-founded after an epic run of oddball leadership and financial adventurism. The Goddess Nature Token is an effort to marry Web3 technology with environmentalism and…

Photo: JEFF PACHOUD/AFP (Getty Images)A team of researchers studying satellite images of the Alps made a concerning find: Since 1984, most of the high-elevation parts of European mountain range have seen an increase in vegetation. While that might not sound particularly troublesome, this “greening” is likely due to global warming and may be facilitating a feedback loop that is also reducing snow cover.“When snow and ice recedes, vegetation develops, and that’s what we call greening,” Antoine Guisan, professor of ecology…