Teaching Tools
Conservation is ideal for the classroom. In each issue, as a supplement to the feature articles, we provide study resources and a series of online discussion questions to stimulate classroom debate.
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2008
October-December 2008 (Vol. 9, No. 4)
Impostor Fish
Misnaming seafood isn’t just a ripoff. It’s a global phenomenon
that’s wreaking havoc on ocean conservation.
By Douglas Fox
The Sterile Banana
As uniformity replaces diversity, some of your favorite fruits could
be on the cusp of extinction.
By Fred Pearce
The Most Popular Lifestyle on Earth
Forget lions, tigers, and sharks. The billions of tiny parasites that
make a living castrating and brainwashing their hosts may be the
new kings of the food web.
By Carl Zimmer
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July-September 2008 (Vol. 9, No. 3)
Confessions of a Hit Man
Our mark was an invasive pest that had made a remote tropical island its home.
But good and evil are not so easily discerned in ecological systems, even
when a place looks like Eden.
by Jeffrey A. Lockwood and Alexandre V. Latchininsky
Ecological Freakonomics
How does tourism drive deforestation? How are divorce rates linked to resource consumption? What’s the connection between clean water and international terrorism?
by Jonah Lehrer
The Problem of What to Eat Cover Story
Organic farming and eating locally make intuitive sense. But does conventional wisdom about eating sustainably hold up to the science?
by Natasha Loder, Elizabeth Finkel, Craig Meisner, and Pamela Ronald
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April-June 2008 (Vol. 9, No. 2)
Do Trees Grow on Money? Cover Story
After years of failed attempts to merge market economics with rainforest conservation, the US$60 billion carbon market might finally be the ticket. That is, if money is all it’s going to take.
by Fred Pearce
Identity Crisis
Hybridization can be both a creative and a destructive force. And it’s on the rise. Should we embrace it or quash it?
by Douglas Fox
A Witness to Violence
Long before the Darfur crisis, Michael Fay foresaw that the murderous Sudanese horsemen would not stop at killing elephants.
by J. Michael Fay
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January-March 2008 (Vol. 9, No. 1)
Cancer on a Whole Species Cover Story
The gruesome disease ravaging Tasmanian devils is unlike anything we’ve seen before.
by Cynthia Mills
Ecosystems Unraveling
Pull predators out of the mix, and a once lush green world turns into an ecological shop of horrors.
by William Stolzenburg
Urban Myths
When most of us think about environmentally friendly places, we imagine a terrain untouched by concrete. Cities seem like ecological nightmares. But perhaps the conventional wisdom is exactly backward.
by Jonah Lehrer
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2007
October-December 2007 (Vol. 8, No. 4)
Saint Ursus Maritimus
Icons are about simplicity and clarity. No gray areas. But what happens when the real polar bear clashes with the symbol it has become?
by Jim Robbins
Wildlife Contraception
Charged with downsizing wildlife populations to fit the geography of the modern world, a small group of researchers is out to replace bullets with family planning.
by Douglas Fox
The Vision Thing
Imagine swapping Tony Blair for Winston Churchill. Would it transform the timid politics of global warming?
by Ted Nordhaus & Michael Shellenberger
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July - September 2007 (Vol. 8, No. 3)
Arresting Evidence
State-of-the-art forensic technology is forcing us to face the reality that even our most applauded trade bans and moratoriums aren’t working. From ivory cell phones to shark fin soup, it’s all availableóat a price.
by Natasha Loder
The Last Gladiators
How joyful, really, is the resurrection of a species if the modern world cannot find a single haven for it and if it seems doomed to slip into limbo once more anyway?
by Scott Weidensaul
10 Solutions to Save the Ocean
We asked a select group of innovative thinkers to go out on a limb.
Martín Hall, Daniel Pauly, David Conover, Amanda Vincent, Kimberly Davis, Carl Safina, George Sugihara, Ussif Rashid Sumaila, and Tundi Agardy
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April - June 2007 (Vol. 8, No. 2)
Aliens Among Us
Invasive species stand accused of ecological insubordination, mass murder, and other crimes against nature. But the case is far from closed.
A Round Table with James H. Brown and Dov F. Sax, Daniel Simberloff, and Mark Sagoff
Writers’ Block
Earnest, pious, and quite allergic to irony: nature writing has none of the trademark qualities that play well in 2007. So is it time for a change?
by Jenny Price
That Sinking Feeling
We dig fossil fuel out of the ground, burn it and fill the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, and then plant trees to soak it back up. If only it were so simple.
by Nick Atkinson
Green Giants
by George Monbiot
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January-March 2007 (Vol. 8, No. 1)
When Worlds Collide
Climate change will shuffle the deck of plants, animals, and ecosystems in ways we’ve only begun to imagine.
by Douglas Fox
Virginity Lost
Pristine forests of the Amazon were not encountered in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; they were invented in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
by Fred Pearce
Are We Putting Tigers in Our Tanks?
The connection between biodiesel, land use, and habitat loss isn’t easy to pin down, but it isn’t easy to ignore, either.
by Staff
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2006
October-December 2006 (Vol. 7, No. 4)
Do No Harm
The story of the Hawaiian crow is a parable of doing harm by going to all lengths to do good. What role should the ancient advice of Hippocrates play in endangered species conservation?
by Mark Jerome Walters
Second Chance
Cloning could be the Holy Grail of conservation or the ultimate folly. Either way, the fact is, cloning works.
by Cynthia Mills
Us or Them
Killing predators stands as one of the most age-old and enduring forms of wildlife management. Even now, myth and politics trump ecology. Is there a way out?
by William Stolzenburg
One Big Fix
A prominent scientist’s proposal for countering climate change says volumes about our plight.
by Elizabeth Kolbert
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July-September 2006 (Vol. 7, No. 3)
Evolutionary Tinkering
A small group of latter-day Noahs is beginning to explore radical new ways to help species ride out the current wave of extinctions.
by Scott Norris
Dig Deeper
When context is lost, what kind of tales can biological relics tell? Paleoecologists are forcing us again and again to rethink what was once established fact.
by Douglas Fox
Fish Futures
George Sugihara thinks the way fish quotas are set is all wrong. Instead, he wants to tap into people’s baser instincts by treating fish catches like tradable poker chips.
by Rex Dalton
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April-June 2006 (Vol. 7, No. 2)
Democratizing Taxonomy
Imagine a portable DNA barcode scanner that could transform people’s relationship with nature. Could such futuristic technology be to biodiversity what the printing press was to literacy?
by Marguerite Holloway
Get Real
Behind the hue and cry over the Kyoto climate change treaty is one nagging but rarely reported reality: even if every nation in the world complied to the hilt, it would hardly approach solving the problem.
by Katherine Ellison
Aux Barricades!
Fortress conservation is making a come-back.
by Jon Christensen
How Do You Measure What You Can’t See?
How do you know what you don’t know? How do you know when you know enough, or when you need to know more?
by Alan Burdick
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January-March 2006 (Vol. 7, No. 1)
Connecting Flights
Never mind the road map for peace. An unlikely marriage between bird conservation and military aviation is thriving on one of the most divisive pieces of real estate on Earth.
by Frances Cairncross
Where the Wild Things Were
The recent Nature paper proposing to bring cheetahs, lions, and elephants to North America raised a wild rumpus. But are the critics missing the point?
by William Stolzenburg
Raising the Bar on Kyoto
New standards require projects to save more than just carbon.
by Adelheid Fischer