By Suzanne York. Are we living in a new climate epoch due to how human activities have affected the planet itself? A number of scientists think so, and have been saying for more than a decade, that Earth is now in the Anthropocene epoch.  But it is a contentious issue, and last month, the highest
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By Suzanne York. ‘Day Zero’ – it’s a term so applicable to our times of environmental overreach. If you aren’t familiar with the term, it came into vogue a couple of years ago when Cape Town, South Africa, was facing a water crisis of fairly epic proportions.  Day Zero was the city’s term for the
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By Suzanne York. If it wasn’t clear before this year, it should be crystal clear now:  we need to change our unsustainable ways of living. For our own sake, business as usual cannot continue.  We’re not talking about 9-5 jobs, shaking hands and public gatherings, though who knows what will happen with all that. No,
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By Joshua Mirondo, youth writer, Transition Earth. Kampala, like many growing cities around the world, suffers from bad air quality. The World Health Organization (WHO) ranked Kampala as one of the most polluted cities in the world in 2016. They carried out a research and discovered that the air in Kampala has dangerous substance small
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By Suzanne York. We humans, in general, pride ourselves on having such ingenious brains, but we’re not always that smart. We live in a society that is using up natural resources at an unsustainable rate – resources upon which our lives depend upon – yet we blithely continue with business as usual. Certainly there are
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By Candela Vázquez Asenjo, youth blogger, Transition Earth. This past summer I volunteered with an orangutan sanctuary located in Borneo, Indonesia. The feeling of being just one more creature in the middle of the forest, no longer an intruder but a guest, is a beautiful gift that few people get to experience. However, there is a
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By Suzanne York. Another Earth Overshoot Day is upon us, this one coming August 2nd, even earlier than last year. This date, calculated by Global Footprint Network, arrives earlier with each passing year, as humanity uses up natural resources faster than the Earth can replenish in a year. Currently we are using the ecological resources
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By Suzanne York. The outrage over the killing of Cecil the lion from Zimbabwe is palpable. Sadly, this lion is just one of many species of animals killed by trophy hunters (as well as poachers). Yet would people be outraged if they knew that wild habitat for almost all species in Africa – and the
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By Suzanne York. “Can the world get richer forever?” asks a recent article in the BBC News. If you ask a politician, mainstream economist or the 1%, the answer is likely to be “yes.”    As noted in the BBC piece, growth “is almost universally seen as a Good Thing.”  If you ask most environmentalists, scientists
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By Suzanne York, www.howmany.org In the U.S., almost all the weather news seems to be fixated on the snow storms back East.  Yet despite the cold and snow, more records for heat have been broken than for cold.  The winter of 2014-15 has been so warm across much of the West that more than 20
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