‘No Nile, no Egypt’, Cairo warns over Ethiopia dam

By Shadia Nasralla; Editing by Alastair Macdonald, Tom Pfeiffer, and Kevin Liffey9 June 2013 CAIRO (Reuters) – Egypt’s foreign minister, vowing not to give up “a single drop of water from the Nile”, said on Sunday he would go to Addis Ababa to discuss a giant dam that Ethiopia has begun building in defiance of […]

Land degradation threatens food security

By MD. ASADULLAH KHAN8 June 2013 (The Daily Star) – With two centuries of an unprecedented population boom, likely to reach 9 billion by 2050, land degradation by human activities and climatic upheavals poses a threat to food security, especially in a land-scarce country like Bangladesh. Historically known, it took the human species about 150,000 […]

Where the Millennium Development Goals fell short: valuing Nature

Dr. Fred Boltz 29 May 2013 (Conservation International) – This week in New York City, the 27 members of the high-level panel of eminent persons appointed by the U.N. Secretary General will deliver a report providing recommendations on the post-2015 development agenda. This is a critical opportunity to address the inadequacies of the Millennium Development […]

Peak Water, Peak Oil? Now, Peak Soil? – ‘It takes half a millennium to build two centimetres of living soil and only seconds to destroy it’

By Stephen Leahy31 May 2013 REYKJAVÍK, Iceland (IPS) – Soil is becoming endangered. This reality needs to be part of our collective awareness in order to feed nine billion people by 2050, say experts meeting here in Reykjavík. And a big part of reversing soil decline is carbon, the same element that is overheating the […]

Global majority faces water shortages ‘within two generations’ – 4.5 billion people already live within 50km of an impaired water resource – ‘These are self-inflicted wounds’

By Fiona Harvey, environment correspondent 24 May 2013 (The Guardian) – The majority of the 9 billion people on Earth will live with severe pressure on fresh water within the space of two generations as climate change, pollution and over-use of resources take their toll, 500 scientists have warned. The world’s water systems would soon […]

Vendor’s suicide by self-immolation reflects despair of Mideast youth – ‘There is no quick solution that will address all the aspirations of young people looking for jobs now’

By KARIN LAUB 11 May 2013 SOUK AL-JUMMA, Tunisia (Associated Press) – On the day he chose to die, Adel Khedri woke up at 6:30 a.m., took his black backpack and headed down to the busy boulevard where he worked as a cigarette peddler. It was the last in a series of odd jobs that […]

Video: Timelapse satellite views of human destruction of the biosphere over three decades

By Jeffrey Kluger (TIME) – Spacecraft and telescopes are not built by people interested in what’s going on at home. Rockets fly in one direction: up. Telescopes point in one direction: out. Of all the cosmic bodies studied in the long history of astronomy and space travel, the one that got the least attention was […]

Paolo Soleri, 1919-2013: Architect dies in Arizona

[Des visited Arcosanti as a child and still has a couple of ceramic “windbells” hanging in the living room window.] PHOENIX, 9 April 2013 (Sante Fe New Mexican) – Italian-born architect Paolo Soleri, who designed what for years was Santa Fe’s most popular music venue before moving on to Arizona to build a futuristic community […]

Short on graves, China turns to sea burials

By William Wan3 April 2013 BEIJING (Washington Post) – In this country of almost 1.4 billion people, life is an unending struggle for resources — money, property, even spouses. And it doesn’t get easier in death. Prices for graves are skyrocketing, driven by decades of unbridled development and scarce city land. The government’s answer to […]

Video: Two very different reports on China’s ghost cities

Desdemona has been following the “ghost city” story since Business Insider first collected satellite photos of new, empty cities in China in 2010. NBC News did a story on the ghosts that haunt China’s landscape in 2012. Business Insider has a new story for 2013: Scary new satellite pictures of China’s ghost cities. Now, Wade […]

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