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...
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...
Noteworthy
“We’ve got this tremendous problem. If we do nothing, children are going to lose years of life. It’s not their fault. They don’t even understand it."
So begins an interview between New York...
When he saw a mother and baby die in childbirth from a preventable and treatable condition, Myshkin Ingalawe decided to put a stop to it. “It” is undiagnosed anemia—an iron deficiency that contributes...
A new documentary, directed by former journalist Pamela Sherrod Anderson, highlights the unusual case of Arthur Dixon Elementary School on the South Side of Chicago. “Usually, when you hear stories...
In August of last year, the Whanganui River gained its citizenship. Under New Zealand law, the third-longest river in the country will be recognized as a person “in the same way a company is, which...
When nine-year old Martha Payne began a food blog last year, chronicling the paucity of her school lunches, she was not prepared to become a social media star. Payne’s blog, entitled “NeverSeconds,”...
She lived in a small Ugandan village and had lost five of her nine children over the past decade. The spirit, it seemed, the very will to live, had fled her. A neighbor asked if she would be willing to...
Caterpillars might not be haute cuisine for many Americans, but a new organization in Africa is promoting them as a simple, nutritious solution to the continent’s high rate of malnutrition. Shea...
In just over a month, a small team from San Francisco was able to reconstruct five readable documents from 10,000 scraps of paper. The U.S. Department of Defense paid out $50,000 and gained, in turn, a...
Japan powered down its last nuclear reactor earlier this year to make the world’s third-largest economy nuclear free for the first time in almost half a century. The closure of the Tomari plant in...
Eric Schwarz had an idea: to harness the experience and knowledge of trained professionals and bring it to the classroom. After graduating from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, he launched his...
With President Obama and his Republican challengers gearing up to spend millions on their election campaigns, is there any way to defeat organized money? The answer, according to voters in Maine, is...
After Mozambique’s decade-long war for independence (1964–1974) and the civil war that ended in 1992, a network of landmines remained buried in all ten of the country’s provinces. Anti-vehicle mines...
In 2000 an Afghan family paid a trafficker to take them over the border into Pakistan and then on to Denmark or Sweden. But when the trafficker arrived, there was only one spot in the van. The family...
Since the development of antiretroviral drugs in the 1990s, the battle against AIDS has largely been fought over the question of how to distribute the drugs fairly. The drugs save lives, with recent...
When a natural disaster strikes in the West, farmers can turn to their insurance companies for aid. In the developing world, where the dangers are often more acute, and risk of failure grim, there is...
Perspectives
“With the move from an agrarian to an industrial economy, the small rural schoolhouse was supplanted by the big brick schoolhouse. Four decades ago we began to move to another economy but we have yet to develop a new educational paradigm, let...
Indian power companies have their hands full generating and transporting power to cities and large factories—the current peak power deficit is 13 percent and growing. The problem isn’t just that the energy need is much larger than the production...
What connects a group of Bayaka pygmy hunters in the Congo Basin, opposed to illegal loggers encroaching on their land; residents of Deptford, in South London, concerned about a noisy scrapyard across the road from a school; and members of the...
The landscape of postsecondary textbook publishing is undergoing a significant makeover with the introduction of high-quality digital textbooks. As with the introduction of most technology, there is resistance, not the least arising from...
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REVIEWING
Owning Our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution
Marjorie Kelly, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2012
In the beginning, God created...
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Exploring solutions presented in our special July/August issue on Appalachia
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Bowdoin College's Phil Camill offers a fresh perspective to the issues surrounding environmental change.
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Resilient maybe, but ecologically sustainable?
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