Other writing

LONDON — When Gabe Brown and his wife bought their farm near Bismarck, North Dakota, from her parents in 1991, testing found the soil badly depleted, its carbon down to just a quarter of levels once considered natural in the area.

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.

MUSTAFABAD, India — Khushboo Kushwaha has a few years before she will have to squat in front of a filthy, smoking open stove three times a day to cook meals for her family, as her older sister and cousins do now.

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.

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.