Other writing

LONDON — From coffee to cocoa, and almonds to blueberries, some of the world’s most nutritionally and economically vital food crops are vulnerable to declines caused by catastrophic die-offs of the bees whose pollination is key to their life cycle.

On a dusty patch of ground beneath a concrete overpass, about a hundred children, the sons and daughters of rickshaw drivers and farm laborers, sit cross-legged on dirty mats, in bare feet or flip-flops, learning their letters and numbers—and the basics of environmental protection.

LONDON — As fears grow of a future in which antibiotics are powerless against rampaging infections in humans, experts are stepping up the call to act on what they say is a large part of the problem: overuse of the drugs on farm animals.

A family living in the middle of an eight-lane motorway, an autorickshaw driver struggling to breathe, a young woman who can’t wait to leave ... the foul air of India’s capital affects all sections of society.

BERKELEY, California — California is cruising toward its 2020 goal for increasing renewable energy and is setting far more ambitious targets for the future. Its large-scale solar arrays produced more energy in 2014 than those in all other states combined. Half the nation’s solar home rooftops are in the state, and thousands more are added each week.

A lot has changed in Ethiopia since hundreds of thousands of people died in the famine of the mid-1980s. Rates of undernourishment have plummeted in the past 25 years, child mortality is down by two-thirds and 90 percent of children go to primary school.