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, […]