Richard Schiffman

NEW YORK CITY—Humans eat more than 30,000 species of plants and animals. But for the most part we don’t know much about what is in them. Researchers have thoroughly analyzed the molecular components of only a few hundred of the most common foods, leaving a vast gap in our knowledge of nutrition.
This week, food scientists and activists met here to launch a new database that aims to close that gap. The database, part of a project called the Periodic Table of Food Initiative (PTFI), spearheaded...

It was a “revolution in kindness,” we read in “Our Kindred Creatures: How Americans Came to Feel the Way They Do About Animals.” That’s how Bill Wasik, the editorial director of the New York Times Magazine, and his wife, the veterinarian Monica Murphy, describe the animal welfare movement, launched in 1866 after the Civil War when Henry Bergh, an American diplomat, founded the ASPCA, the first animal protection organization in the United States.
This well-researched book is an enlightening if...

A landscape architect in China has a surprising strategy to help manage surges of water from storms supercharged by climate change.
March 28, 2024, 5:02 a.m. ET
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Cities around the world face a daunting challenge in the era of climate change: Supercharged rainstorms are turning streets into rivers, flooding subway systems and inundating residential...

Cary Fowler, the U.S. State Department’s leading figure on global hunger, explains a new way to improve nutritious food supply
By Richard Schiffman
Agriculturist Cary Fowler is best known as former executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust and co-founder of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which houses more than 1.2 million seed samples covering every crop variety imaginable on an island in the Norwegian Arctic. Now he’s engaged in an ambitious new plan to use the genes in neglecte...

A rare look at how the Bruderhof of the Hudson Valley navigate the outside world while keeping it at arm’s length.
Relaxing during a coffee break at the Bruderhof community at Fox Hill, in Walden, N.Y. About half of the worldwide members of the group live in six villages in the Hudson Valley.Credit...Hilary Swift for The New York Times
It was early afternoon on a sunny winter Thursday, and the Fox Hill community looked like a well-manicured ghost town abandoned in the 1950s. Stately multistor...

After the pandemic boom in pet adoption gave way to pet abandonment, locals in Brooklyn are trying a controversial approach to population control.

The Supreme Court’s recent ruling that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency does not have the power to regulate power plant emissions will seriously hamper U.S. efforts to slow climate change. So says Christine Todd Whitman, who served as EPA administrator under George W. Bush for three years, and was New Jersey’s first woman governor.

Urban ecologist Eric Sanderson focuses on the natural history of cities. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, he explains why recovering and restoring streams, salt marshes, and woodlands should be a vital part of how cities adapt to climate change in the 21st century.

Researchers from across Europe have converged on the Neretva River for a “science week” aimed at building the case for conservation.

Millennials and Gen Z have grown up on a different planet with tougher choices than their parents. Accepting that is the first step in avoiding despair.

Don Riepe pointed to the line on the wall five and a half feet above his kitchen floor. That was where floodwaters reached during Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

His home, a humble two-story wooden structure, is decorated with nautical maps, horseshoe crabs and assorted maritime paraphernalia. It sits right on Jamaica Bay, with a small dock at the water’s edge, where he moors his 22-foot boat. ...

Deforestation in the Amazon can seem like a remote problem over which we have no control — but forest advocates say that’s not true. They argue that smarter choices at the dinner table would go a long way toward safeguarding the world’s largest rainforest.

What they have in mind might become clearer on a flight from Brazil’s capital of Brasilia to Manaus, the largest city in the Amazon. If you look out the window halfway through the flight, you’ll see a checkerboard landscape of farmland inte...