The tale of China’s modernization is being told along its winding dirt trails, the paved gray roads in its cities and, more recently, its ambitious network of highways. In rural Hainan, farmers still pedal to their paddy fields before dawn, bumping along paths of dusty red soil. In the urban explosions of Beijing and Shanghai, however, bicycles now have to fight for space with ever-increasing numbers of motor vehicles—and residents have to fight to breathe.
In 1995, when Richard Sechrist took over the Texas ranch his family had owned since 1947, it looked like much of the grazed land in the West: barren. Generations of cattle had been allowed to roam freely over the 1,100-acre ranch, trampling pastures rock-hard and munching native plants down to nothing. Weeds and thistles were abundant, while riparian areas were muddy, erosion-prone swamps.
Not Much Sustainability at the World Summit South Africa is a country of fabulous wealth and grinding poverty, but few delegates to the World Summit on Sustainable Development held in Johannesburg, South Africa August 26 through September 4 saw much more of the city than the malls and banking halls of one of the continent’s […]
A tree grows in Brooklyn, New York, and federal inspectors were swarming all over it looking for the Asian longhorned beetle—a sort of vampire cockroach that punctures the arteries of hardwood trees. The beetle reportedly arrived in Brooklyn from China in 1996 aboard a wooden shipping palette and was transferred to a showroom in Amityville, […]
As a kid I was forced to go to Sunday school, where the second half of the hour was sometimes spent in church itself. My friends and I delighted in sitting in the balcony and making up our own silly words as we sang along to hymns like "Go Down Moses and Let My People Go." I was also once sent out into the hall for sketching a funny picture of a big-nosed, toothless man with a cleft chin when we were all asked to draw what we thought God looked like.
When conservative evangelical Christians call for action on global warming, Hindu holy men dedicate themselves to saving sacred rivers and Buddhist monks work with Islamic mullahs to try to halt the extinction crisis, boundaries are clearly being redrawn in the ongoing struggle for the political hearts and minds of the world’s believers.
Like his wife, Mary Evelyn Tucker, John Grim teaches in the religion department at Bucknell University. As a historian of religions, he has conducted considerable fieldwork on Native American "lifeways" and is the author of The Shaman: Patterns of Religious Healing Among the Ojibway Indians
Paul Gorman has been a communicator all his life, so it’s not surprising that his work since 1993 as the executive director of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment (NRPE) involves networking among major Christian and Jewish denominations.
Over the past century, science has begun to weave together the story of a historical cosmos that emerged some 12 billion years ago. The magnitude of this universe story is beginning to dawn on us, as we awaken to a new realization of its vastness and complexity.
If there’s juice in your child’s school backpack, it’s more than likely that it’s stored in a paper-and-foil aseptic package, complete with a colorful cartoon logo. Although aseptic packaging was invented to safely ship foods without refrigeration—a feature that has helped feed many people in the developing world—it is more familiarly used in the U.S. for convenience drinks. And while some environmentalists applaud the merits of aseptics, a number of important questions remain.
