Next week in Kuala Lumpur thousands of people from around the world will gather for the third global Women Deliver conference (May 28-30). The participants will include government leaders, policymakers, healthcare professionals, reporters, and nonprofit leaders. Their goal, which is as urgent as it is worthy, is to...

Lest my comments be misinterpreted, let me state at the outset that eating more insects is not a bad idea. It may, in fact, be a great idea. Despite the revulsion that most Americans have to consuming insects, most insects are nutritious, a good source of protein, and in some...

Last week a great theological debate broke out in the world's greatest deliberative body. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island rose on the floor of the U.S. Senate to challenge the remark of an unidentified fellow senator, whom, he said, told him that God would not allow humanity to ruin...

Jeremy Grantham, the famed investor and co-founder of GMO, one of the world's most successful investments firms, has both bad news and good news for us. The bad news, briefly stated, is that we are on the road to economic and ecological ruin. Grantham's good news, if I can characterize...

With the world's attention riveted on war-torn Syria, far too little attention has been focused on Egypt's economic woes and their long-term implications for the region. Heavily dependent on food imports for survival, Egypt desperately needs cash, but its foreign currency reserves have been shrinking dramatically and without...

The current geologic epoch, which began with the end of the last Ice Age, has long been called the Holocene, but a growing number of scientists want to rename it the Anthropocene (i.e. "the Age of Man") in recognition of the enormous impact that humanity now has on the planet's...

In most communities today, Earth Day celebrations attract small audiences and a fraction of the attention that Earth Day celebrations did four decades ago. The concerns that led to the original Earth Day have not gone away. They are, if anything, magnified several times over, but the crowds continue to...

It has been 40 years since a man last walked on the moon, and NASA announced this week that it had no plans to send another manned mission to the moon anytime soon. If someone had told me 40 years ago that there might not be another U.S....

In a rapidly changing world, nation states -- just like plant and animal species -- must evolve, adapt or perish. When the conditions that gave rise to their existence cease to exist, change must come. It can come in the form of a political breakup, as it did in the...

When we look at the Arab world through a political lens we focus on the political maneuverings of the moment and lose sight of the epic forces that are shaping the future of the Middle East. That is particularly true with respect to Egypt, where the growing political...

Since the dawn of civilization humanity has been engaged in the relentless pursuit of more. Our relentless desire for more has led us to procreate more, extract more, harvest more, trade more, build more, produce more, sell more, promote more, and consume more.

In the pursuit...

A year ago, virtually no one in Washington was paying any attention to Mali. Few Members of Congress would have been able to locate it on a map, and even fewer would have been able tell you much, if anything, about it. Not so today. Thanks to a coup and...

Okay. The election is over, the new year has started in earnest, a new Congress has been sworn in and state legislatures across the country are preparing to reconvene. It is time to close the partisan divide and end the silliest war on the planet: the war on contraception.

New Year's Day is a time for fond reminiscence of things past and hopeful anticipation of things to come, but the bracing optimism that greeted the new millennium just 13 years ago has given way to a brooding pessimism, and the hopes that soared four years ago when Barack Obama...

Nothing is for certain, but in an 80-100 year timeframe, the prognosis is not good for large mammals, large fish and even large trees. Many young people will likely witness in their lifetime the virtual extinction of elephants, rhinos, lions, tigers and many other large mammals. With their numbers steadily...

In less time than it takes to fire off two 9 millimeter handguns and kill dozens of people, the politicians, from the White House on down, will be putting out public statements deploring the school shooting in Connecticut, calling it tragic, and immediately adding that "now is not the time"...

When environmentalists ring alarm bells about what we are doing to the Earth, most Americans hit the snooze button, but when one of the world's most respected financial analysts says that climate change and resource scarcity are imperiling economic growth, maybe it's time to wake up.

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Listen to the clamor this year from the religious right and you would think that most people of faith reject family planning as a moral wrong and a social evil. Hardly. Public opinion polls have consistently shown that support for the use of contraceptives knows no religious bounds. Most

On this day, October 11, when the UN and the world observe the first International Day of the Girl, we have a chilling reminder of just how far we have to go before girls achieve true gender equality. Malala Yousufzai, a 14-year-old Pakistani girl who was...

A study released earlier this month suggests that numerous species of slugs, worms, spiders and other spineless creatures are in rapid decline. The report, issued by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, warns that rising human population is threatening one out of five invertebrate species with extinction....