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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.

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.

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.”

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.”

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.

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. 

The idea that money is available for the taking defies economic logic. But sometimes it’s true.

The opportunity is investing in energy efficiency. “The returns are tremendous, and there’s virtually no risk,” said Mark Orlowski, the founder and executive director of the Sustainable Endowments Institute,

Although no one is refusing to consider the idea, he explained, “People say, ‘We’re overloaded and this isn’t a fire that needs to be put out now.’ But if they actually did an energy audit, they would find millions of dollars in savings — and that money could be used for all sorts of things: scholarships, new faculty positions, even more pay for the university president.”

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.

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!

The deepest problem is Exxon’s business plan. The company spends huge amounts of money searching for new hydrocarbons. Given the recent plunge in oil prices, its capital spending and exploration budget was indeed cut by 12 percent in 2015 to $34 billion, and another 25 percent in 2016 to $23.2 billion. In 2015, that meant Exxon was spending $63 million a day “as it continues to bring new projects on line.” They are still spending a cool $1.57 billion a year looking for new sources of hydrocarbons — $4 million a day, every day.

That’s why it’s wildly irresponsible for a company to be leading the world in oil exploration when, as scientists have carefully explained, we already have access to four or five times as much carbon in the Earth as we can safely burn.