One way to make sense of the biodiversity crisis would simply be to accept it. The history of life has, after all, been punctuated by extinction events, both big and very, very big. The impact that brought an end to the Cretaceous wiped out something like seventy-five percent of all species on earth. No one wept for them, and, eventually, new

Depending on whom you ask, you’ll get a lot of different dates for the onset of the Anthropocene. Stratigraphers, who like clarity, tend to favor the early 1950s. As the United States and the Soviet Union vied for Strangelovian supremacy, aboveground nuclear testing became routine. The tests left behind a more or less permanent marker—a spike in

The number of species that can be found on a healthy patch of reef is probably greater than can be encountered in a similar amount of space anywhere else on earth, including the Amazon rainforest. Researchers once picked apart a single coral colony and counted more than eight thousand burrowing creatures belonging to more than two hundred species.

With all of these alternatives, the challenge is much the same as with direct air capture: scale. Ning Zeng is a professor at the University of Maryland and the author of the “wood harvest and storage” concept. He has calculated that to sequester five billion tons of carbon per year, ten million tree-burial trenches, each the size of an Olympic

The first government report on global warming—though the phenomenon was not yet called “global warming”—was delivered to President Lyndon Johnson in 1965. “Man is unwittingly conducting a vast geophysical experiment,” it asserted. The result of burning fossil fuels would, almost certainly, be “significant changes in the temperature,” which would,

Since calcite or sulfate (or diamond) particles lofted into the stratosphere drop back down after a couple of years, they’d need constant replenishing. If the SAILs flew for a few decades and then, for whatever reason—a war, a pandemic, unhappiness with the results—they stopped, the effect would be like opening a globe-sized oven door. All the

One year after its founding, L’Isle de la Nouvelle Orléans suffered its first inundation. “The site is drowned under half a foot of water,” Bienville wrote. The settlement would remain submerged for six months. Rather than retreat again, the French dug in. They raised artificial levees atop the natural ones and started cutting drainage channels

At the end of the day, Seidemann and the others loaded their boats on trailers and, with the carp still in them, drove into town. The fish, now inert and glassy-eyed, were dumped into a waiting semi-trailer. This round of barrier defense continued for another three days. The final tally was six thousand four hundred and four silver carp and five

Declining emissions and rising atmospheric concentrations point to a stubborn fact about carbon dioxide: once it’s in the air, it stays there. How long, exactly, is a complicated question; for all intents and purposes, though, CO2 emissions are cumulative. The comparison that’s often made is to a bathtub. So long as the tap is running, a stoppered