Richard Schiffman is an environmental journalist, poet and author of two books based in New York.
Can We Mine the World’s Deep Ocean Without Destroying It?
Few people know the deep ocean as intimately as Lisa Levin, an ecologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Not content with doing pure science, Levin, who has participated in more than 40 oceanographic expeditions, co-founded the Deep-Ocean Stewardship Initiative, a global network of more than 2,000 scientists, economists, and legal experts that seeks to advise policymakers on managing the ocean’s depths.
Of particular concern to Levin now is the prospect of deep-sea mining. The tin...
As Climate Changes, Colombia’s Small Coffee Farmers Pay the Price
At first glance, Finca El Ocaso, located in the hills outside Salento, Colombia, could be mistaken for a natural forest: rows of squat Arabica coffee trees are interspersed with plantain, banana, and lime and shaded by towering nogal cafatero trees, whose high canopy hosts flocks of chattering parrots and other birds. The 44-acre coffee plantation has been certified by international organizations for being sustainable, climate-friendly, and fair to its workers.
But Finca El Ocaso is strugglin...
Beyond Factory Farms: A New Look at the Rights of Animals
Philosopher Peter Singer’s book, Animal Liberation, helped launch the animal rights movement nearly 50 years ago. He talks with Yale Environment 360 about how we now better understand how animals feel pain and how other species are not so different from humans as we thought.
Peter Singer has been called one of the most influential — and controversial — philosophers alive today. His pioneering work Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals, which vividly portrayed the harsh ...
How to Clear 500,000 Feral Cats From New York’s Streets
After the pandemic boom in pet adoption gave way to pet abandonment, locals in Brooklyn are trying a controversial approach to population control.
Former EPA Chief: Supreme Court's Ruling Is a ‘Body Blow’ to the U.S.
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.
The Living City: Weaving Nature Back Into the Urban Fabric
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.
In the Balkans, researchers mobilize to protect a wild river
Researchers from across Europe have converged on the Neretva River for a “science week” aimed at building the case for conservation.
Can today's youth overcome widespread climate anxiety?
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.
Is This the Last Generation to Live on New York City’s Wild Fringes?
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. ...
Demand for meat is destroying the Amazon. Smarter choices at the dinner table can go a long way to help.
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...
In conversation with Jane Goodall on climate change — and remaining hopeful for the future
A half century ago, Jane Goodall was spending months at a time sitting in the Gombe forest in what is now Tanzania waiting for wild chimps to approach her so that she could observe their behavior. Her superhuman patience paid off. The young researcher discovered that chimps are more like us than we had imagined — lavishing affection on their young, forming social hierarchies, making tools and even warring with rival bands.
But Goodall says that her most vital work began when she left the fore...
We’re at home among trees — which might be able to sense our presence
Far from the solitary giants we imagine them to be, trees are highly social creatures that communicate chemically and electromagnetically with their neighbors, warn one another of dangers, and share resources through the tangled network of their root tips underground, as Wohlleben revealed in his earlier bestseller, “The Hidden Life of Trees.” That book was sometimes shelved in the fiction section of bookstores because it was chock full of mind-bending revelations suggesting that trees are se...
Nature as a Salve for Children With Autism
Erin Laraway and four of her students were pulling radishes from raised growing beds in a vest-pocket garden tucked into the side of the Brooklyn Occupational Training Center, a public high school for adolescents with special needs in the Gravesend section of Brooklyn one recent Friday morning.
“How many radishes do you have there, Javier?” Ms. Laraway asked an 18-year-old who was rocking back and forth. He was “stimming,” a repetitive behavior many people with autism use to soothe themselves...
‘Mother Trees’ Are Intelligent: They Learn and Remember
Few researchers have had the pop culture impact of Suzanne Simard. The University of British Columbia ecologist was the model for Patricia Westerford, a controversial tree scientist in Richard Powers’s 2019 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Overstory. Simard’s work also inspired James Cameron's vision of the godlike “Tree of Souls” in his 2009 box office hit Avatar. And her research was prominently featured in German forester Peter Wohlleben’s 2016 nonfiction bestseller The Hidden Life of Tree...
The Healing Power of Music
“Focus on the sound of the instrument,” Andrew Rossetti, a licensed music therapist and researcher said as he strummed hypnotic chords on a Spanish-style classical guitar. “Close your eyes. Think of a place where you feel safe and comfortable.”
Music therapy was the last thing that Julia Justo, a graphic artist who immigrated to New York from Argentina, expected when she went to Mount Sinai Beth Israel Union Square Clinic for treatment for cancer in 2016. But it quickly calmed her fears about...