The World of Ants: a ubiquitous empire of 20 quadrillion individuals. Explore their evolution, superorganism colonies, specialized societies, and ecological impact as global engineers.
Introduction: The Inevitable Dissolution of the Cyberpunk Paradigm
The Cyberpunk paradigm, a fixture of speculative fiction for half a century, is defined by a fundamental...
1. Historical Baseline
Pre-1750 Wilderness Extent
The brown bear watched from the forest edge as Peter the Great's surveyors marked trees for his new capital. In...
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The Two-Faced Bean: The Ubiquitous Legume
It...
News in brief — October 2025
IUCN has listed the Marl / south-western barred bandicoot (Perameles myosuros) as Extinct (EX) in its latest global Red...
GREEN CITIES SERIES | ARTICLE 10
In 2017, Shenzhen became the first city in the world to operate a fully electric public bus fleet. In 2019, its entire taxi fleet followed. These are not incremental improvements or pilot schemes — they are structural transformations, achieved at a speed...
Clean energy is booming, yet emissions keep breaking records. A clear-eyed 2026 look at climate action—what's working, what's failing, and what it will take.
GREEN CITIES SERIES | ARTICLE 8
Every Sunday, Bogotá returns the streets to its people. That act — repeated for fifty years, in a city of nine million at 2,600 metres above sea level, in a country still reckoning with decades of violence — is both a practical...
GREEN CITY SERIES| ARTICLE 11
How river daylighting changed the argument in South Korea’s capital — and why the harder work of a green city lies beyond one celebrated stream
Few urban projects have entered the global planning imagination as forcefully as Seoul’s restoration of the Cheonggyecheon. The removal...
GREEN CITIES SERIES | ARTICLE 9
For fifty years, urban planners have travelled to Curitiba to study what happened when a young architect-mayor decided that a city was not, fundamentally, for cars. What they found was real, was replicable, and was also — when examined carefully — more...
This is an updated and revised version of a piece that I published last year. Regrettably, all is not well in the golden valley of apricots when it comes to climate change reversal, it just keeps getting hotter and the weather wilder. All is not lost though...
In May 2026, the international climate arena presents a striking paradox. It is alive, highly active, and structurally transformed, yet it remains profoundly underpowered relative to the physical systems it seeks to govern. The institutional architecture established by the Paris Agreement has not collapsed; on the contrary,...
GREEN CITIES SERIES | ARTICLE 6
London has done something that most cities only talk about: it has used road pricing to change behaviour at scale, and it has used air quality regulation to drive a measurable improvement in the health of nine million people. But the city...
How Norway’s capital turned climate policy into budgets, procurement, and quieter streets — and why even Oslo is not yet a finished green city
Standfirst
Oslo is often invoked as proof that urban decarbonisation can move from aspiration to administration. The Norwegian capital has electrified large parts of its...
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