A review of The Environment and World History by Edmund Burke III and Kenneth Pomeranz. Six months is all it took to flip Europe’s climate from warm and sunny into the last ice age, researchers have found. A review of On Thin Ice: The Changing World of the Polar Bear by Richard Ellis and After the Ice: Life, Death and Geopolitics in the New Arctic by Alun Anderson. Jeremy Bernstein on the disappearing snows of Everest. Rapa Nui deja vu: Tourism threatens to trigger another ecological collapse in Easter Island (and more). It's not just about Copenhagen: In Papua New Guinea, the battle between environmental protection and economic development plays out with one controversial gas project. In a remote patch of the Pacific Ocean, hundreds of miles from any national boundary, the detritus of human life is collecting in a swirling current so large that it defies precise measurement (and more and more on the Pacific Garbage Patch). Artist and photographer Chris Jordan examines the bad habits of human consumption with work that depicts trash in all its incarnations. Plastic Not-So-Fantastic: How the versatile material harms the environment and human health. Water-hogging, pesticide-laden golf courses occupy more than 2.3 million acres of United States green — thanks to pressure from environmentalists, however, some courses are trying to bring the sport back to its roots: in nature. American Ruins: Camilo Jose Vergara on how nature is taking back these buildings. A look at how climate change affects world heritage sites. How can we communicate the dangers of nuclear waste to future civilizations?
