Category: Less of What We Don’t Need

Aspartame—the artificial sweetener found in everything from Diet Coke and sugar-free chewing gum to children’s medications—may raise the risk of the most common type of stroke by causing inflammation and disrupting blood vessel health and blood flow, according to new research.

When chemical giant Syngenta hired biologist Tyrone Hayes to study its widely used herbicide atrazine, the company didn’t like the results. Hayes found that atrazine, one of the most common weed killers in America, disrupted hormones in frogs and altered their sexual development. Instead of facing the science, Syngenta went into product-defense mode: pressuring Hayes…

Even very low levels of nitrate in drinking water—far below the federal government’s safety threshold—may significantly increase the risk of premature birth and low birth weight, according to a new study. Nitrate, a pervasive chemical that enters drinking water mainly through chemical fertilizer runoff and animal manure from farms, is invisible, odorless, and tasteless—leaving many…

A critical yet often overlooked question in the energy transition debate is how much total energy—accounting for materials, services, and other embedded uses—can a society/community/family sustainably consume. While there is no consensus, we can consider models like pre-crisis Sri Lanka or Kerala in India, which achieved high Human Development Index scores with relatively low per…

When Sowjanya Soujanaya goes to her ATM garden in Edulamaddali in the morning, she not only finds enough herbs, spices and tubers to cook a healthy lunch for her family of five, but also always finds something to sell at the market. ATM stands for “Any Time Money” and is a mixed cultivation of more…

Such a model promises to protect the environment, achieve climate neutrality, avoid overexploitation of natural resources and enhance biodiversity while boosting the economy by creating jobs and wealth (European Commission, 2018). Thus, the bioeconomy according to its promoters aspires to save the planet without having to give up our current economic model.

Greg Grandin’s new book shows that “America” (or, in Spanish, América) was the name used for the whole hemisphere by the late 17th century. In the 18th, the great liberator Simón Bolívar set out his vision of “our America”: a New World free of colonies, made up of distinct republics living in mutual respect. He…

In the United States, around half of the food that people eat every day is ultra-processed—industrially manufactured products, like chips or candy, that are made by breaking down whole foods, modifying and combining them with additives to make them more attractive in the way they look, smell and taste. Scientists have linked consumption of ultra-processed…

In “A Southern Panther,” movement elder Malik Rahim talks about his lifetime of battling racism and fighting for peace and environmental justice. Former Louisiana Panther Malik Rahim first came to national and international attention in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans. “This is criminal ” is his harrowing account of…

Ancient oak trees rise above gigantic boulders scattered across a high desert mesa in Arizona’s Tonto National Forest. This is Oak Flat (Chi’ chil Bildagoteel), a sacred site for Native Americans, including the Western and San Carlos Apache. And like many other lands across the West, it’s under grave threat from multinational mining interests, all…