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Every morning as a child, I'd watch thousands of men walk down that hill to work in the shipyard. I'd watch those same men walking back home every night. It has to be said, the shipyard was not the most pleasant place to live next door to, or indeed work in. The shipyard was noisy, dangerous, highly toxic, with an appalling health and safety record. 2:34 Despite that, the men and women who worked on those ships were extraordinarily proud of the work they did, and justifiably so. Some of the largest vessels ever constructed on planet Earth were built right at the end of my street.

He said, "What the hell are you gonna do?" ♪ 11:23 ♪ I said, "Anything but this!" ♪ 11:26 ♪ These dead man's boots know their way down the hill ♪ 11:29 ♪ They can walk there themselves and they probably will ♪ 11:32 ♪ But they won't walk with me ‘cause I'm off the other way ♪ 11:35 ♪ I've had it up to here, I'm gonna have my say ♪ 11:37 ♪ When all you've got left is that cross on the wall ♪ 11:40 ♪ I want nothing from you, I want nothing at all ♪ 11:43 ♪ Not a pension, nor a pittance, when your whole life is through ♪ 11:46 ♪ Get this through your head, I'm nothing like you ♪ 11:49 ♪ I'm done with all the arguments, there'll be no more disputes ♪ 11:54 ♪ And you'll die before you see me in your dead man's boots ♪

So the procession is moving at a stately pace down my street, and as it approaches my house, I start to wave my flag vigorously, and there is the Queen Mother. I see her, and she seems to see me. She acknowledges me. She waves, and she smiles. And I wave my flag even more vigorously. We're having a moment, me and the Queen Mother. She's acknowledged me. And then she's gone. 13:50 Well, I wasn't cured of anything. It was the opposite, actually. I was infected. I was infected with an idea. I don't belong in this street. I don't want to live in that house. I don't want to end up in that shipyard. I want to be in that car.

real issue, though, is not the volume of problems, but the interactions among them. Here we find a core lesson from the bees that we ignore at our peril: the concept of synergy, where one plus one equals three, or four, or more.

the most sophisticated data set available for any species about synergies among pesticides, and between pesticides and disease. The only human equivalent is research into pharmaceutical interactions, with many prescription drugs showing harmful or fatal side effects when used together, particularly in patients who already are disease-compromised.

We discovered that crop yields, and thus profits, are maximized if considerable acreages of cropland are left uncultivated to support wild pollinators. Continue reading the main story 98 Comments Continue reading the main story Recent Comments Clyde Wynant 26 minutes ago There is no precedent in the short history of mankind for the toxic soup of chemical we all ingest from birth to death, in our food supply,... Carolyn Egeli 37 minutes ago Thank you for this thoughtful piece on the demise of the honeybees. The clear message is we have a problem the increasing use of pesticides... phyllis 58 minutes ago Bzzzzzzzzz! A very good reminder of the dying huge numbers of honeybee colonies and the also the plants they pollinate . We must always... See All Comments Write a comment A variety of wild plants means a healthier, more diverse bee population, which will then move to the planted fields next door in larger and more active numbers.

So what do we do? This cascade of self-perpetuating, pernicious, negative effects could seem like something that's spun out of control, and there's nothing we can do about it, certainly nothing we as individuals could do. But in fact, we've been finding in our own laboratory research that small psychological interventions, small changes to people's values, small nudges in certain directions, can restore levels of egalitarianism and empathy. For instance, reminding people of the benefits of cooperation, or the advantages of community, cause wealthier individuals to be just as egalitarian as poor people.

Russian speakers are on average 124 milliseconds faster than English speakers at identifying when dark blue shades into light blue. A French person is a tad more likely than an Anglophone to imagine a table as having a high voice if it were a cartoon character, because the word is marked as feminine in his language.This is cool stuff. But the question is whether such infinitesimal differences, perceptible only in a laboratory, qualify as worldviews — cultural standpoints or ways of thinking that we consider important. I think the answer is no.

In Mandarin Chinese, for example, you can express If you had seen my sister, you’d have known she was pregnant with the same sentence you would use to express the more basic If you see my sister, you know she’s pregnant. One psychologist argued some decades ago that this meant that Chinese makes a person less sensitive to such distinctions, which, let’s face it, is discomfitingly close to saying Chinese people aren’t as quick on the uptake as the rest of us. The truth is more mundane: Hypotheticality and counterfactuality are established more by context in Chinese than in English.

But if a language is not a worldview, what do we tell the guy in the lecture hall? Should we care that in 100 years only about 600 of the current 6,000 languages may be still spoken?The answer is still yes, but for other reasons.

Nature can survive far more than what we can do to it and is totally oblivious to whether homo sapiens lives or dies in the next hundred years. Our concern should be about protecting ourselves — because we have only ourselves to protect us. Alan Lightman is a physicist who teaches humanities at M.I.T. His most recent book is “The Accidental Universe.”

we sometimes forget that cultural differences represent profound psychological differences. The critical question for all nations is, “How can we engage globalization without losing our traditions?” For traditions are our links with the past. How do our traditions become integrated into some new worldview?At its core, globalization is not about communications technology; it’s about personal identity. It goes to the psychological foundations of a people. It is the process of realizing that wherever we come from, from now on, we are “one people” with one destiny.

WILLIAM V. WISHARD Lake Ridge, Va., May 27, 2014 The writer is a former trends analyst and author of “Between Two Ages: The 21st Century and the Crisis of Meaning.”

We reached out to a handful of scientists, policy experts, writers and activists to ask: “If you could require America to do just one thing — any one thing — to combat climate change in 2014, what would it be?” Here’s what they said:

Take Action in Your CommunitiesAnnie LeonardExecutive director, Greenpeace USA; creator, The Story of StuffIf I could require Americans to do one thing, it is to get active!

Taken alone, the small-scale transformation in my yard doesn’t matter all that much. But a constellation of small patches of milkweed, connecting one neighborhood to the next, might mean the difference between life and death for the monarchs. We need to start thinking not just about what used to be, but what could be. It’s going to take a lot of work. But it sure beats despair. The author of “My Backyard Jungle: The Adventures of an Urban Wildlife Lover Who Turned His Yard Into Habitat and Learned to Live With It,” and an associate professor of creative writing at the University of South Carolina.

We’ve seen them now in the squares of Tunis, Cairo, Istanbul, New Delhi, Damascus, Tripoli, Beirut, Sana, Tehran, Moscow, Rio, Tel Aviv and Kiev, as well as in the virtual squares of Saudi Arabia, China and Vietnam.The latter three countries all have unusually large numbers of Facebook, Twitter or YouTube users, or their Chinese equivalents, which together constitute a virtual square where they connect, promote change and challenge authority. The most popular Vietnamese blogger, Nguyen Quang Lap, has more followers than any government newspaper here. In Saudi Arabia, one of the most popular Twitter hash tags is #If I met the King I would tell him.”

Square People one way or another “are demanding a new social contract” with the old guards who’ve dominated politics. “The people want their voice to be heard in every major debate,” not to mention better schools, roads and rule of law.

tate-owned news outlets reported this month that the government would ban the use of coal in Beijing and other urban areas by 2020 in an effort to reduce the noxious air pollution that chokes many cities. In July, a Chinese academic who is also a senior lawmaker said the government was considering a national cap on coal use as soon as 2016.

But he and other officials have provided few details — and, indeed, have sent conflicting, even disturbing, signals about their plans. Some measures China is considering could actually exacerbate climate change. One particularly misguided plan, for instance, would involve building 50 large industrial facilities in western China to convert coal into synthetic natural gas.

there’s a certain amount of energy keeping us bound to our world (gravitational potential energy)

For Earth, we’d have to move at about 7.9 km/s (17,700 mph) to attain orbit and at about 11.2 km/s (25,000 mph) to escape from Earth’s gravity.

Earth moves around the Sun at approximately 30 km/s (67,000 mph)

what the Germans have done in converting almost 30 percent of their electric grid to solar and wind energy from near zero in about 15 years has been a great contribution to the stability of our planet and its climate.

“In my view the greatest success of the German energy transition was giving a boost to the Chinese solar panel industry,” said Ralf Fücks, the president of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, the German Green Party’s political foundation. “We created the mass market, and that led to the increased productivity and dramatic decrease in cost.”

A German foreign policy official put their dilemma this way: “We have to get used to assuming more leadership and be aware of how reluctant others are to have Germany lead — so we have to do it through the E.U.”Here’s my prediction: Germany will be Europe’s first green, solar-powered superpower. Can those attributes coexist in one country, you ask? They’re going to have to. 

China’s environmental degradation is a consequence of the blind pursuit of growth at any cost. But for the expanding middle class food contamination and air pollution are sources of great anxiety that could ignite serious social unrest.

Yes, there’s a certain satisfaction in being critical of our authors, but isn’t it more interesting to put ourselves in a frame of mind to find inspiration in them?

The skill at unmasking error, or simple intellectual one-upmanship, is not totally without value, but we should be wary of creating a class of self-satisfied debunkers — or, to use a currently fashionable word on campus, people who like to “trouble” ideas. In overdeveloping the capacity to show how texts, institutions or people fail to accomplish what they set out to do, we may be depriving students of the chance to learn as much as possible from what they study.

two traditions: of critical inquiry in pursuit of truth and exuberant performance in pursuit of excellence. In the last half-century, though, emphasis on inquiry has become dominant, and it has often been reduced to the ability to expose error and undermine belief. The inquirer has taken the guise of the sophisticated (often ironic) spectator, rather than the messy participant in continuing experiments or even the reverent beholder of great cultural achievements.

Allowing Cubans to sign cellphone contracts helped swell the state coffers but gave citizens a tool for information and communication. Every little move toward flexibility has provided some economic relief to the administration and, simultaneously, a relative loss of control.

“Raúlist reforms.” The octogenarian leader appears to know that if he speeds up change, the entire sociopolitical model could dismantle before his eyes. While he keeps delivering the same message and proclaiming that changes are “for more socialism,” the reality makes it clear that Cuba is transitioning to a sort of capitalism exempt of labor rights and civic freedom.

A growing number of Cubans build their own receivers to enjoy television programming from Florida. Copies of those shows, popularly known as “the package,” are distributed on USB sticks or external hard drives by clandestine networks.