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This year was an unusually wet one for Mumbai, the commercial capital of India. Until mid-September, the city received rainfall of 2,366 mm, which is 26% more than the usual average of 1,800 mm. This is an ominous trend of extreme weather events, a phenomenon the frequency of which is rising...
Two years ago, my wife and I went to a dog “salon” in a small French town on the other side of Geneva. The puppies were adorable, but even more were the kittens one breeder was exhibiting together with his puppies. Taking advantage of my obvious immediate infatuation with the tiny creatures,...
Look what Greta started and what she did to me! I took part in the recent climate-strike march in New York City, one of a quarter-million people (or maybe 60,000) who turned out there, along with 4 million others across all seven continents. Then I came home and promptly...
Shortly after the turn of the 20th century, American muckraker Upton Sinclair published “The Jungle,” a searing account of the savage working conditions in Chicago’s meatpacking industry. Such a mind-boggling exposé of exploited workers laboring amid rotten, contaminated and diseased meat,...
Led by young people, climate strikers blocked traffic on two mornings at the end of last month in Washington, DC. On the first day, protesters chained themselves to a boat three blocks from the White House, and 32 activists were arrested. On the second day, activists targeted the Environmental...
The Amazon is still burning. This isn’t new. The people who live there know that fires are set in the Amazon rainforest all the time. Tens of thousands of fires are set in the Brazilian Amazon every year and have been for decades. But the scale is unprecedented this year, and the secret is...
With the advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), the potential to integrate technology into the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is reaching new heights. According to Klaus Schwab, Founder of the World Economic Forum, 4IR is “blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and...
In recent weeks, Indonesia has been in the headlines due to forest fires. Having spread throughout the country in Southeast Asia, the regions of Jambi, South Sumatra, Kalimantan and Sulawesi have been severely affected while Riau Province has been the worst hit. According to the National...
As Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg's speech at the UN created ripples worldwide, millions of youngsters took to the streets, protesting against climate injustice and the failure to reduce carbon emissions. Aside from Thunberg, many other youth activists, including Xiye Bastida and...
I know it’s been said many times and throughout history, but we do indeed live in interesting times. And it’s not just because the most unlikely person has become president of the most powerful nation, not because an unplanned and unreasoned proposition has won the vote for an exit from the...
World Peace Day, which is marked every year on September 21, has just passed. The chance to do some soul-searching with regards to the state of peace on our planet is as important as ever before. For all the relative calmness and progress of the second half of the 20th century and the early...
