Features
Your source for incisive, peer-reviewed articles that bring the insight and authority of our panel of experts and authors to bear on the most important ideas for creating a sustainable future.
Email this pageLatest Feature Articles
The world record yield for paddy rice production is not held by an agricultural research station or by a large-scale farmer from the United States, but by Sumant Kumar who has a farm of just two hectares in Darveshpura village in the state of Bihar in northern India. His record yield of 22.4 tons per hectare, from a one-acre plot, was achieved with what is known as the System of Rice Intensification (SRI). To put his achievement in perspective, the average paddy yield worldwide is about four tons per hectare. Even with the use of fertilizer, average yields are usually not more than eight tons.
Sumant Kumar’s success was not a fluke. Four of his neighbors, using SRI methods, and all for the first time, matched or exceeded the previous world record from China, 19 tons per hectare...
0 Comments
It’s the GDP-obsessed growth model, many reformers argue, that’s leading us to perdition. They decry the irresponsibility of a relatively few taking more than their share, who are profligate with the earth’s dwindling resources. Certainly this “we’ve hit the limits” framing rings true, for, inarguably, human societies have exceeded the limits of destruction, depletion, and disruption our planet can sustain without massive human and nonhuman loss and suffering.
But is there a more effective way of understanding the roots of our predicament?
Here’s a possibility.
Let’s start with findings from neuroscience and psychology that offer significant clues about how we got into this mess: Humans beings, it turns out, don’t see the world as it is. “It is theory which...
1 Comments
More Features
Approximately three billion persons around the world eat daily meals cooked with fuel consisting of wood, twigs, agricultural waste, animal dung, and charcoal. They cook in diverse ways with diverse...
The absence of a global regime to control international trade in conventional arms persists despite the fact that in the 22 years between 1989 and 2010, the world witnessed the outbreak or...
Mobile phones: you see them being used in airports, at the grocery store, on subways and buses, and even in the hand of your doctor. In fact, it is difficult to go anywhere these days without seeing...
In Focus
Environmental security has taken on new meaning in the twenty-first century as sustainability and natural resource...
The pathway for conversion to a renewable energy future has been pioneered by Denmark and a few other visionary nations. But...
If the United States intends to meet the Department of Energy’s goal of producing 20 percent of the nation’s electricity...
I fully agree with the idea that world population growth can—and should—be reversed through fertility rates that fall below...
The Guttmacher Institute provides estimates, covering various years in the last decade, of the proportions of all...
Be the First to Know
Groups
805
Exploring solutions presented in our special July/August issue on Appalachia
1,240
Bowdoin College's Phil Camill offers a fresh perspective to the issues surrounding environmental change.
913
This is the University of Vermont Solutions Group. We are based in and around Burlington, VT.
