How the Bottled Water Industry Is Masking the Global Water Crisis

Bottled water is one of the world’s most popular beverages, and its industry is making the most of it. Since the millennium, the world has advanced significantly towards the goal of safe water for all.

Sleeping at the height of summer can sometimes feel impossible. And with gruelling heatwaves becoming more common

Plastic pollution is now pervasive in our environment, contaminating everywhere from our homes and workplaces to the planet’s deepest recesses. The problem regularly makes headlines, with the spotlight turned toward ocean pollution in particular.

Over the past 20 years a steady trickle of scientific papers has reported that there are fewer insects than there used to be. Both the combined weight (what scientists call biomass) and diversity of insect species have declined.

While the days of overt climate denial are mostly over, there’s a distinct form of denial emerging in its stead. You may have experienced it and not even realised. It’s called implicatory denial

Whether you are looking at tropical forests in Brazil, grasslands in California or coral reefs in Australia, it is hard to find places where humanity hasn’t left a mark. The scale of the alteration, invasion or destruction of natural ecosystems can be mindbogglingly huge.

Every two to seven years, the equatorial Pacific Ocean gets up to 3°C warmer (what we know as an El Niño event) or colder (La Niña) than usual, triggering a cascade of effects felt around the world.

The 196 countries meeting for the UN Convention on Biological Diversity conference (COP15) in Montreal, Canada, have set themselves a formidable challenge: ensuring humanity is “living in harmony with nature” by 2050.

Here’s the basic problem for conservation at a global level: food production, biodiversity and carbon storage in ecosystems are competing for the same land.

Nowhere is nature more vibrant than in Earth’s tropical forests. Thought to contain more than half of all plant and animal species, the forests around Earth’s equator have sustained foragers and farmers since the earliest days of humanity.

Many young people feel anxious, powerless, sad and angry about climate change. Although there are some great resources on children’s eco-anxiety and climate distress, the vast majority are designed for and by adults.

One of our most venerable of wisdom traditions, the Chinese I Ching, tells that: ‘in the beginning was the one, the one became two, the two became three – and from the three, ten thousand things were born…’.

With the federal government promising over US$360 billion in clean energy incentives under the Inflation Reduction Act, energy companies are already lining up investments.

The extreme weather that has battered much of the U.S. in 2022 doesn’t just affect humans. Heat waves, wildfires, droughts and storms also threaten many wild species – including some that already face other stresses.

Dengue, a viral infection spread by mosquitoes, is a common disease in parts of Asia and Latin America. Recently, though, France has experienced an outbreak of locally transmitted dengue.

Off the coastline of southern Africa lies the Great African Seaforest, and Australia boasts the Great Southern Reef around its southern reaches. There are many more vast but unnamed underwater forests all over the world.

The koala was clinging to an old tree stag while stranded in the Murray River, on the border between New South Wales and Victoria. A team of students from La Trobe University noticed its predicament as they were paddling by in canoes.

In the midst of today’s cost of living crisis, many people who are critical of the idea of economic growth see an opportunity.

At the start of the 1600s, Japan’s rulers feared that Christianity – which had recently been introduced to the southern parts of the country by European missionaries – would spread.

The rising frequency and intensity of heat waves has been affecting people’s mental health by triggering various forms of emotional distress including eco-anxiety,

Although floods are a natural occurrence, human-caused climate change is making severe flooding events like these more common. 

Indigenous Elders recently shared their dismay about the unprecedented decline in salmon populations in British Columbia’s three largest salmon-producing rivers.

Solar panels, heat pumps and hydrogen are all building blocks of a clean energy economy. But are they truly “essential to the national defense”?