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The fire in 1831 spared the Cathedral of Notre Dame itself. The rioters scrambled up the roof and toppled a giant Iron cross; they shattered stained glass, took axes to [...]

'We Just Need More Hands': Climate change's effects are 'horrifying,'but two experts see promise in public action. DURING THE decades-long struggle to forestall climate change, some moments looked like watersheds [...]

The pandemic has reminded us of the urgent need to stop abusing the planet. It could inspire us to prevent the looming climate disaster--if we can resist a return to [...]

IN AMSTERDAM I met a man who revealed to me the hidden currents of our lives--the massive flows of raw materials and products deployed, to such wonderful and damaging effect, [...]

Content not available due to copyright restrictions. SHANGHAI, CHINA Near the center of this city of 24 million, China's largest, the Yanan expressway crosses under the North-South expressway. The country [...]

To plunge headlong into the audacity of Dubai--the sprawling efflorescence of concrete, glass, and steel that has sprung up over the past three decades on the scorched sands of Arabia--you [...]

More than a million refugees arrived last year, many fleeing wars in Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Hundreds of thousands more have come this year, as the continent's latest great migration [...]

Germany's energy revolution aims to replace nukes and fossil fuels. Could it be a model for the world? Hamburg knew the bombs were coming, and so the prisoners of war [...]

Unhealthy. Nutritious. Cruel. Delicious. Unsustainable. All-American. In the beef debate there are so many sides. At Wrangler Feedyard, on the High Plains of the Texas Panhandle, night was coming to [...]

The Romans had a serious trash problem, though by our standards it was good-looking trash. Their problem was amphorae. They needed millions of the curvy clay jars to ship wine, [...]

Glaciers are supposed to advance or retreat at a glacial pace. Now they're disappearing before our eyes. We know the climate is changing, but wrapping our minds around that fact [...]

It was five days before Christmas, and in the hut on the north flank of Eyjafjallajokull, the volcano that grounded airplanes all over Europe in 2010, Sigurdur Reynir Gislason was [...]

Earth was hot and ice free at the end of the Paleocene epoch. With sea level 220 feet higher than now, the Americas--not yet joined by continental drift--were smaller. Look [...]

One day in Delft in the fall of 1677, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, a cloth merchant who is said to have been the long-haired model for two paintings by Johannes Vermeer--'The [...]

One day in 1963, when Jim Boucher was seven, he was out working the trapline with his grandfather a few miles south of the Fort McKay First Nation reserve on [...]

When provided with continuous nourishment, trees, like people, grow complacent. Tree-ring scientists use the word to describe trees like those on the floor of the Colorado River Valley, whose roots [...]

For the past decade the North Sea cod fishery has been shrinking--and everybody knew, or should have known, that a disaster was coming. Fishermen knew it was getting harder and [...]