Features

For hundreds of years, cork has been the gold standard for "stopping" wine. But now plastic stoppers and screw tops are challenging the tradition, and the benefits are causing even prestigious vintners and snooty wine reviewers to change their attitude from dismissal to acceptance.

Organic wines are hot, according to Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher, wine columnists for The Wall Street Journal. "They’re attracting unprecedented attention both from consumers and from today’s more skilled winemakers," says Gaiter.

No one told Salamatou Adamou about the "birth dearth." A midwife and widow, she had already given birth to 12 children by the age of 37. "I am exhausted," she said as she struggled through labor with child number 13. Her large family is not all that unusual in drought-stricken Niger, a country where widespread poverty combines with strict patriarchy, early marriages, a lack of health care access and educational opportunities for women, sanctioned polygamy and adherence to fundamentalist Islamic tenets on procreation to produce the highest birth rate in the world, eight children for every woman.

The U.S. is the only industrialized nation with significant population growth, and a new report sees those burgeoning numbers as a factor in our unparalleled impact on the environment.

In mid-2005, women around the world had an average of 2.7 children, according to the Population Reference Bureau. That seven-tenths of a percentage point above replacement level may not seem like a lot, but it is contributing to a dramatic population expansion, from 6.4 to 9.2 billion, between now and 2050.

Drylands cover 41 percent of the Earth’s land surface. Of that area, desertification has rendered 20 percent unfit for human use, and an additional 70 percent remains vulnerable. According to the United Nations, desertification is degrading soil quality in 110 countries, directly impacting 250 million people and threatening a billion more, all without creating a single new desert.

Randy Miles likes to teach soil science from pits dug deep into the earth. The University of Missouri soil science professor enjoys taking his students into the field, prying clods from the pit face and showing the distribution and properties of soils across Midwestern landscapes.

If soils do indeed achieve the higher profile they so desperately need, John L. Havlin will be one of the people to thank. The professor at North Carolina State University is past president of the Soil Science Society of America, and a dedicated campaigner whose work is helping to establish the House of Representatives Soils Caucus and a $4 million Smithsonian educational exhibit on the subject, opening in 2008.

Can toxic waste be turned from a disposal problem into a useful and benign fertilizer? That’s the question some scientists and activists are asking about a product that is routinely used by farmers and home gardeners to feed their soils.