Sustainability

China is well known for its medicinal use of wild plants, a tradition that dates back thousands of years. These traditional Chinese medicines include many wild orchids, some quite showy. Typically, orchids are consumed alone or mixed with other herbs in tea or soup. The health benefits vary depending on species; conditions for which orchids are used include immune system boosting, hypertension and stroke. Many of these medicinal orchids are among the 40-plus species in the genus Dendrobium. In recent decades, supplies of wild-sourced medicinal Dendrobium orchids have declined steadily, with shortages of some types. This is occurring in the limestone regions of Guizhou and Guangxi, the main area where Dendrobium has grown naturally, due to a combination of overharvesting by collectors and habitat loss. I am an ecologist and lead several research projects in southwestern China, where the nation’s first orchid nature preserve is located in a zone with a highly diverse asso...

Maine lobster fishermen received a Christmas gift from Congress at the end of 2022: A six-year delay on new federal regulations designed to protect critically endangered North Atlantic right whales. The rules would have required lobstermen to create new seasonal nonfishing zones and further reduce their use of vertical ropes to retrieve lobster traps from the seafloor. Entanglement in fishing gear and collisions with many types of ships are the leading causes of right whale deaths. Maine’s congressional delegation amended a federal spending bill to delay the new regulations until 2028 and called for more research on whale entanglements and ropeless fishing gear. Conservationists argue that the delay could drive North Atlantic right whales, which number about 340 today, to extinction. This is the latest chapter in an ongoing and sometimes fraught debate over fishing gear and bycatch – unintentionally caught species that fishermen don’t want and can’t se...

To meet today’s global sustainability challenges, the corporate world needs more than a few chief sustainability officers – it needs an army of employees, in all areas of business, thinking about sustainability in their decisions every day. That means product designers, supply managers, economists, scientists, architects and many others with the knowledge to both recognize unsustainable practices and find ways to improve sustainability for the overall health of their companies and the planet. Employers are increasingly looking for those skills. We analyzed job ads from a global database and found a tenfold increase in the number of jobs with “sustainability” in the title over the last decade, reaching 177,000 in 2021. What’s troubling is that there are not enough skilled workers to meet the rapid growth in green and sustainability jobs available. While the number of “green jobs” grew globally at a rate of 8% per year over the last five...