Green Options

China has lost nearly 90% of the wheat varieties that were grown across the country sixty years ago and India grows only 10% of the rice varieties that appeared in its fields a hundred years ago.

Subsistence farmers in Bolivia have been given help to change their technology – moving away from pipe and sprinkle irrigation systems to an aeons-old technique of hand-built raised clay platforms that are surrounded by canals.

While global grain reserves had been replenished in the last couple of years, this was simply a short-term achievement. Global food security remains a goal, not a reality.

Forget the disaster movie scenarios of tsunamis, changes in the Earth’s magnetic core, the arrival of aliens or the mutation of some native species to giant size—our biggest risk is that we lose those small, aerodynamically impossible, stripy creatures so famous for their eccentric flight and delicious honey as well as their wax.

New research from the National Science Foundation suggests a warming Earth could mean a significant increase in voracious, plant-eating insects.

Scientists studying the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a period about 55 million years ago when global carbon dioxide levels spiked rapidly, found that plant fossils from that time show noticeably more insect damage than plants from before or after the PETM. They [...]