Articulos
Ours is very much a living planet populated by myriad life forms—as Darwin termed it: “endless forms, all beautiful”—and since no organism can exist without affecting its environment, globalization has significant implications for biological diversity. The converse is equally true. Biological diversity is a relatively recent term meant to encompass the variety of life on […]
Introduction Nearly everyone on the planet has by now encountered the words “global warming.” They appear almost daily in our newspapers and on television. Dozens of books on this subject and countless magazine articles appear each year. I hold the perhaps dubious distinction of having been the first to use them in print. In 1975, […]
“The best thing you could do for the Amazon is to bomb all the roads.” Dr. Eneas Salati, Technical Director, Brazilian Institute for Sustainable Development, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil “Highways are the seeds of tropical forest destruction.” Dr. Thomas E. Lovejoy, Biodiversity Chair, Thomas H. Heinz Center Washington, D.C., USA “In the Congo, rapidly proliferating […]
Introduction Growing worldwide demand for energy, and problems of scarcity and environmental impact associated with conventional sources are at the base of a very probable energy crisis in the next two or three decades. Petroleum will become increasingly expensive and scarce, while the climatic effects of massive use of all fossil fuels will by then […]
The Soviet Union’s successful launch of two Sputnik satellites in the fall of 1957 came as a shock to many Americans. Although the US intelligence community was not surprised, ordinary Americans were, and the two launches demonstrated without any doubt that the Soviet Union had a lead over the US not only in satellites, but […]
«We are being forced to question whether the extraordinary trends in mobility that have characterized the past fifty years are “sustainable.”»
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One reason anti-poverty policy has not worked better than it has is because we went into it naively, without enough of an understanding of what makes it hard. This essay addresses what I have learnt about this question from my own research, most of which, is based in India. Finding the poor Who are the […]
Both technique and art, architecture is also a constructed expression of society. As technique bordering on engineering, it has experienced the impact of new materials and innovation in the areas of construction, structures, or installations, facing the historic challenge of sustainability. As public art, it has been a participant—and sometimes a protagonist—in the renewal of […]
Why is there no economics of science? I would like to begin with this question: Why is there still no recognized discipline called “The Economics of Science”? After all, economics as a discipline has shown strong imperialistic tendencies in recent decades. It has successfully colonized many fields, but it has yet to colonize science. We […]
The Internet, a global network of networks, is a remarkably complex technical system built on the creative contributions of scientists around the world from the 1950s to the present. Throughout its evolution, the Internet and other networks have been promoted by governments, researchers, educators, and individuals as tools for meeting a range of human needs. […]