Recent decades have seen remarkable developments across the pastures of the world. Even as production of meat and dairy from ruminants (grazing animals such as cattle and sheep) increased by almost a third, the footprint of pasture has begun to decline. And this change is significant, shrinking by nearly 64 million hectares, an area larger than France, between 2000 and 2013. The gains have been considerable for conservation. To the benefit of endangered species from the Asiatic cheetah in Iran to the saiga antelope in Kazakhstan, pastureland is going out of production and returning to nature. While promising, these developments will not be enough to assure that rising demand for meat does not put new pressure on critical habitats. Global demand for ruminant meat and dairy is expected to rise by 44% between now and 2050. Even as pasture has shrunk in the global aggregate, it continues to expand in many parts of the world, particularly in emerging economies and the tropics, where some of the most intact and threatened areas of natural habitat remain.

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Our best stories about poetry and poems offer free links to poems from contemporary and classic American poets.

From autofiction to ‘unbooks’ and ‘Ancient Mariner novels’

We all know about the environmental and physical effects of climate change. But what about its impact on our mental health? Therapists report that their patients are exhibiting symptoms of what they call “climate anxiety” – loss of sleep, changes in appetite, feelings of grief, anger and hopelessness. How do we maintain our optimism in the face of a global existential crisis? And how do we talk with others about our fears without turning them off – or freaking them out? Three climate psychologists discuss how to cope with mounting anxiety brought on by climate change.

It might have got record companies to finally wake up to a few grotty upstarts doing it for themselves, but the nothing in the real world changed.

At some point over the last decade, the human population crossed a remarkable threshold. Writing at the close of World War II, the sociologist and economic historian Karl Polanyi called that shift “the Great Transformation.” For most people over the past two centuries, the Great Transformation has entailed moving from subsistence agriculture to off-farm employment; from economic relations based upon barter, tribute, and reciprocity to those structured around markets and wages; and from economies in which arable land, and the amount of labor that could be applied to it, were the sole determinants of wealth and economic growth to economies in which capital and technology have untethered human well-being from brute physical labor. In “Taking Modernization Seriously,” New America Foundation cofounder and long-time Breakthrough Journal contributor Michael Lind channels Polanyi, reminding us that “the Industrial Revolution remains the fundamental fact of our time.” Like Polanyi, Lind rejects the idea that modern economic relations represent either the natural state of human affairs or a spontaneous evolution of human relations1 “The primary units in the world economy,” Lind argues, “are not private actors—workers, consumers, investors, firms—but states.” But while Lind refuses to naturalize modern economic relations, he also refuses to reduce modernity to little more than markets, capitalism, and the creation of self-interested individuals, as Polanyi would have it. Tied up in pitched, ideologically driven arguments about economic relations and the environment, critics of capitalism have often conflated basic economic development and capitalism, and then proceeded to deny, or at least ignore, the extraordinary and broadly shared advances in material welfare that most humans on the planet have experienced over the past two centuries. The idea, Saunders observes, “owes its provenance to a most unlikely duo of canonical economic thinkers,” Thomas Malthus and Karl Marx. Ecological economists like Herman Daly and Robert Costanza found common cause with Marxist scholars such as Paul Sweezy, Fred Magdoff, and John Foster, combining Marx’s insight that capitalism required continual economic growth with Malthus’ warning that human demand for food and resources would inevitably run up against resource constraints. The resulting mashup, Saunders argues, “made Malthusian arguments accessible to elements of the global left that had historically rejected them” and struck a chord in the popular environmental imagination. In recent years, charges of extractivism and calls for degrowth have moved from the fringes of the environmental discourse toward the center, as a new brand of climate activist demands a fundamental shift in modern economic and political arrangements. In “Does Capitalism Require Endless Growth?” Saunders marshals a raft of economic evidence, along with neoclassical economic theory, to challenge this narrative. It may be inevitable that capitalism will collapse without endless economic growth. That need not inevitably lead to economic collapse, Saunders argues. “A capitalist economy,” Saunders argues, “is as likely as any other to see stable and declining demands on natural resources and ecological services. Marx and Malthus, Paul Robbins sagely observes in “After the Baby Bust,” both wrote their foundational works during an extended period of unprecedented population growth across the United Kingdom and Western Europe. Even though virtually all advanced developed economies and many emerging economies now have fertility rates below replacement, “our habits of thinking, in economics, ecology, and politics, have hardly changed.” Arguments about population growth and scarcity have so dominated political and economic discourse that little thought has been given to a world in which both might be absent. Robust demographic and economic growth, Saunders and Robbins remind us, may be more an artifact of the early phases of the Great Transformation than a permanent condition of modernizing societies. Contrary to the notion that econom

Focusing on the top 1 percent is a mistake. The real class divide is between the upper middle class—the top 20 percent—and the rest of America.

I love New Girl . I love Zooey Deschanel. I love pink and I love glitter and I love all things girly. But you know what I don’t [always]...

Doomsday cults, serial murderers, urban legends, and more to get you in the Halloween mood.

Hype is an ineffective communication strategy, especially when based on limited facts. There are many elements to effective communication – simply raising awareness about a problem is not enough if…

The good news, says author David Wallace-Wells, is that "civilization will endure." The bad news? Pretty much everything else.

Global methane in the atmosphere is on the rise again after a period of leveling off, but scientists tracking this phenomenon at the National Oceanic...

This love-filled collective and its compelling leader had quite the creative output.

We wrestle with the dark side of human nature, and ask whether it's something we can ever really understand, or fully escape.

Amy Woolard took 10 years off from writing and got a law degree. Now she balances dual careers as a rising-star poet and child-welfare attorney (with a little help from Siri).

Here's why environmentalists should cheer on the end of poverty.

Climate change is all about degrees. And we sure don’t want to accumulate six of them, writes CNN’s John Sutter.

We are suckers for hype. The recent media sequel of the mythical Insect Armageddon and the coverage of the latest WWF report on wildlife declines are a reminder of this. Global declines in insect p…

Cleveland doesn't have a "gayborhood." Is that a sign to others that the city isn't open to diversity?

Almost imperceptibly, we are stepping off the consumption treadmill

Inside the shrewd marketing effort behind Alison Bechdel's acclaimed graphic memoir, 'Fun Home'

Richard V. Reeves and Katherine Guyot discuss four ways in which the U.S. could help its middle class without increasing the deficit.

Change the political genre, fight for something new, Acker’s work urges us, because conventional politics in the post-factual age is failing to evolve.

Instead of buying houses and cars, they're investing in non-tangible assets that protects their earning power.

A case for modernization as the road to salvation

Former president of Mexico makes the case for better land use as chair of the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate by Julie Mollins

Why has Europe and America dominated human advances in the last few hundred years, and is China poised to take over? Stanford historian Ian Morris answers those questions in his new book, The Measure of Civilization.

When artist and director Jimmy Turrell gets in from work, the last thing he wants to do is work. This, you’d think, is fair enough. After all, don’t most of us feel like we deserve a chance to rest, recuperate after a long, hard day at the creative coalface?