Buscador avanzado

Además de costar vidas humanas, la temporada de incendios forestales de este año en Australia, de una intensidad sin precedentes, destruyó cerca de 2500 viviendas, mató a cientos de millones de animales, golpeó la economía y sometió al gobierno a una enorme presión. En uno de los años más secos y calientes desde que se tiene registro, los incendios recalcan la profundidad y complejidad de los retos globales a los que nos enfrentamos. Del mismo modo, el brote del COVID-19, que comenzó cuando un nuevo coronavirus pasó de un animal a un ser humano en China, hoy amenaza con interrumpir la vida social y económica en el planeta.…  Seguir leyendo »

La fotografía de la Tierra tomada por William Anders desde el Apolo 8 en 1968 Credit William A. Anders/NASA

En 1968, el astronauta William Anders miró hacia afuera desde su cápsula en la misión Apolo 8 que orbitaba alrededor de la Luna y vio a la Tierra de color azul que emergía sobre el grisáceo horizonte lunar. Fue la primera vez que alguien vio un “amanecer lunar” y la foto que tomó se volvió icónica.

En ella, nuestro planeta se ve solo y frágil en contraste con lo negro del espacio. A cincuenta años, la foto de Anders sigue siendo un resumen visual de la apremiante necesidad de salvar al planeta de nuestro pésimo comportamiento. Pero ¿qué tal si hemos malinterpretado el significado real de esa imagen?…  Seguir leyendo »

Tweaking Genes to Save Species

Biotechnologists have engineered the mosquito that spreads the Zika virus to pass a lethal gene to its offspring. Another team of researchers has devised a way to spread sterility through the mosquito population, using a technique called gene drive to wipe out the offending insects.

If regulators approve this genetic tinkering, these insects could become a powerful weapon against the spread of mosquito-borne diseases to humans. But bugs like these, and the techniques used to create them, might have another role to play: helping to protect the earth’s biodiversity.

This kind of genetic meddling makes many environmentalists deeply uncomfortable. Manipulating nature’s DNA seems a hugely risky and ethically fraught way to help save the natural world.…  Seguir leyendo »

El 22 de abril, el mundo celebrará el cuadragésino quinto aniversario del Día de la Tierra, establecido en 1970 para señalar a la atención las amenazas medioambientales. Nunca dichas amenazas habían sido mayores ni más urgentes que hoy. La combinación de cambio climático, erosión de la biodiversidad y agotamiento de los recursos naturales está lanzando el planeta a un punto de inflexión allende el cual objetivos como el desarrollo sostenible y la reducción de la pobreza serán más difíciles de alcanzar que nunca.

Desde 1970, los científicos han descubierto no sólo que la actividad humana es el motor primordial del cambio medioambiental de la Tierra, sino también que está llevando al planeta más allá de sus límites.…  Seguir leyendo »

A blue-footed booby watches tourists in Puerto Ayora, on the island of Santa Cruz in the Galápagos. Credit Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

Unesco calls the Galápagos Islands a “living museum and showcase of evolution,” but they are much more than that. The islands have become the world’s foremost conservation laboratory, which scientists and the Ecuadorean government have promoted as a model on how humanity might prevent, or even reverse, the catastrophic species depletion that has taken place relentlessly ever since Charles Darwin first pondered the finches there.

These efforts matter more than ever now, as recent research suggests that Darwin was wrong when he rejected the natural catastrophe theory of evolution. According to a recent report from the World Wildlife Fund, populations of more than 10,000 vertebrate species declined by 52 percent on average between 1970 and 2010.…  Seguir leyendo »

We Can Save Coral Reefs

Parrotfish eat algae and seaweed. These brightly colored fish with beaklike mouths inhabit coral reefs, the wellsprings of ocean life. Without them and other herbivores, algae and seaweed would overgrow the reefs, suppress coral growth and threaten the incredible array of life that depends on these reefs for shelter and food.

This was happening in Bermuda, until the government stepped in 30 years ago and banned fish traps that were decimating the parrotfish population. Today, Bermuda’s coral reefs are relatively healthy, a bright spot in the wider Caribbean, where total coral cover has declined by half since 1970.

Last month, in a reminder of just how dire the situation facing the world’s coral reefs is, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said it was listing 20 species of coral as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, including all of what were once the most abundant Caribbean corals.…  Seguir leyendo »

Birds are a critical part of our ecological system. But more than ever, birds are threatened by human pollution and climate change.

We need the birds to eat insects, move seeds and pollen around, transfer nutrients from sea to land, clean up after the mass death of the annual Pacific salmon runs, or when a wild animal falls anywhere in a field or forest.

How could we enjoy spring without the birds flitting busily in our garden or dropping by to check out the flowers in our urban window box? Can you contemplate America without the soaring bald eagle, or even those scavengers like the pigeons and gulls that clean up discarded food scraps on our city streets and waterfronts?…  Seguir leyendo »

Christmas is tied to the magical north and to the reindeer — creatures of mythical power that fly through the night across the world, helping to distribute happiness and good will. But reindeer do exist — we call them caribou in North America — and these animals and their home in the boreal woodlands and on the barren-ground tundra are in trouble.

For the past decade, I have been conducting aerial surveys of caribou herds. As I sit strapped in small planes in minus-20-degree temperatures, it amazes me that that they survive against the challenges of their environment — particularly the females.…  Seguir leyendo »

About the closest most Americans will ever get to a polar bear are those cute, cuddly animated images that smiled at us while dancing around, pitching soft drinks on TV and movie screens this holiday season.

This is unfortunate, because polar bears are magnificent animals, not cartoon characters. They are worthy of our utmost efforts to protect them and their Arctic habitat. But adding polar bears to the nation’s list of endangered species, as some are now proposing, should not be part of those efforts.

To help ensure that polar bears are around for centuries to come, Alaska (about a fifth of the world’s 25,000 polar bears roam in and around the state) has conducted research and worked closely with the federal government to protect them.…  Seguir leyendo »

Why don’t polar bears eat penguins? Because their paws are too big to get the wrappers off, obviously. It’s not a joke you hear so often these days, though, because polar bears are now a serious business. They’re the standard-bearers of a tear-jerking propaganda campaign to persuade us all that, if we don’t act soon on climate change, the only thing that will remain of our snowy-furred ursine chums will be the picture on a pack of Fox’s glacier mints.

First there came the computer-generated polar bear in Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth; then that heartrending photo, syndicated everywhere, of the bears apparently stranded on a melting ice floe; then the story of those four polar bears drowned by global warming (actually, they’d perished in a storm).…  Seguir leyendo »

Durante tres años unas veinte personas han estado reuniéndose, leyendo, investigando, discutiendo, para hacer un informe. Son hombres y mujeres de diversas profesiones y, como en el poema de Borges Los conjurados, han tomado la extraña resolución de ser razonables. La materia de la que versa su informe tiene un nombre conocido y una improbable definición. El nombre: libros de texto. La definición: ese lugar en donde unas generaciones dejan constancia de lo que a su entender debieran conocer las siguientes. No de todo lo que debieran conocer, pero sí de lo imprescindible, del punto de partida, el mínimo común denominador de una sociedad.…  Seguir leyendo »