In some cultures, people are frugal while in others they tend to be generous. Some cultures favour meticulous planning while others favour living in the moment. Theories abound about how and why differences like these between cultures emerge and, increasingly, researchers are looking to the environments people live in for answers. Scientists have long speculated about where cultural differences come from. Some have highlighted the role of institutions such as the Catholic Church. Others have pointed to the kind of crops traditionally grown in different regions, such as rice in the south of China and wheat in the north. But a growing body of evidence suggests that human culture can be shaped by key features of the environment. Michael Varnum, an associate professor of psychology at Arizona State University in the US, wanted to track how much of an impact it made. Using data from over 200 countries, Varnum and his team studied the connections between nine ecological variables ' including rainfall and temperature, but also inequality, population density and disease threat ' and 66 cultural variables including personality traits, social values and motivation....
The abandoned fieldstone walls of New England are every bit as iconic to the region as lobster pots, town greens, sap buckets and fall foliage. They seem to be everywhere ' a latticework of dry, lichen-crusted stone ridges separating a patchwork of otherwise moist soils. Stone walls can be found here and there in other states, but only in New England are they nearly ubiquitous. That's due to a regionally unique combination of hard crystalline bedrock, glacial soils and farms with patchworks of small land parcels. Nearly all were built by European settlers and their draft animals, who scuttled glacial stones from agricultural fields and pastures outward to fencelines and boundaries, then tossed or stacked them as lines. Though the oldest walls date to 1607, most were built in the agrarian century between the American Revolution and the cultural shift toward cities and industry after the Civil War. The mass of stone that farmers moved in that century staggers the mind ' an estimated 240,000 miles (400,000 kilometers) of barricades, most stacked thigh-high and similarly wide. That's long enough to wrap our planet 10 times at the equator, or to reach the Moon on its closest approach to Earth....
More than four decades ago, field ecologists set out to quantify the diversity of trees on a forested plot on Barro Colorado Island in Panama, one of the most intensively studied tracts of tropical forest on the planet. They began counting every tree that had a trunk wider than a centimeter. They identified the species, measured the trunks, and calculated the biomass of each individual. They put ladders up the trees, examined saplings, and recorded it all in sprawling spreadsheets. As they looked at the data accumulating year after year, they began to notice something odd. With some 300 species, the tree diversity on the tiny 15-square-kilometer island was staggering. But the distribution of trees among those species was also heavily lopsided, with most of the trees belonging to only a few species. Since those early studies, that overstuffed, highly uneven pattern has been seen repeatedly in ecosystems around the world, particularly in rainforests. The ecologist Stephen Hubbell of UCLA, who was part of the team behind the Barro Colorado surveys, estimates that less than 2 percent of the tree species in the Amazon account for half of all the individual trees, meaning that 98 percent of the species are rare....
Conflict, the climate crisis and now COVID-19 are forcing people to go hungry. One in three people (nearly 2.37 billion) didnât have enough food in 2020 - 320 million more than in 2019, according to the World Bankâs analysis of World Food Programme data.
And 272 million people are already or are at risk of becoming acutely food-insecure due to the COVID-19 crisis, in the countries where the World Food Programme operates, meaning their life or livelihood is in immediate danger due to lack of food.
The FAO makes the case for using agroecological methods to strengthen the resilience of food systems, in a report published last year, especially in severely affected regions such as sub-Saharan Africa.
In 2007, a severe drought in Lesotho and South Africa caused crop yields to drop dramatically. The main staple food in Lesotho, maize, doubled in price and became unaffordable for many. A fifth of the population needed emergency food assistance....
