With gyms, restaurants, and workplaces reopening, people from every part of my life are asking for expert advice on how to ingrain new and healthier habits as we re-emerge from our pandemic cocoons. Their instinct that now is the right time to make a change is spot on—my research shows that having a “fresh start” is a powerful motive to initiate positive change at home and at...

A version of this story first appeared in the Climate is Everything newsletter. If you’d like sign up to receive this free once-a-week email, click here. The surge of COVID-19 cases and the humanitarian crisis now unfolding in India has shocked the world and led to a search for an explanation of how the situation got so bad so fast. Scientists are investigating several factors including...

If you’re not at least a little worried about the core stage of China’s Long March 5B rocket now flying—tumbling, really—through low Earth orbit, you’re not paying enough attention. The giant chunk of space junk measures 30 m (98 ft) long and 5 m (16.5 ft) wide and weighs 21 metric tons. It’s traveling on an elliptical path around the Earth measuring roughly...

And the networks of communication and support we rely on

Nobody ever believed the pandemic would go easy on children. The virus might target them less directly than it targets older people, but other challenges—the loss of school, the loss of play, the loss of time with friends—would exact their own emotional toll. A study published April 29 in JAMA Network Open sheds light on how serious that harm has been. The work, led by psychologist...

Few people think about the time Michael Collins didn’t go to the moon. Collins, who died of cancer on April 28 at age 90, is best remembered as Apollo 11’s command module pilot—in some ways the unluckiest man on the luckiest mission of all time. It was Apollo 11 that, in the summer of 1969, stuck the first crewed lunar landing, taking Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin down to the...

Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin filed a protest against NASA’s decision to award Elon Musk’s SpaceX a $2.9 billion award to develop a human-lander system to return astronauts to the moon. Blue Origin called on the U.S. Government Accountability Office to stay NASA’s deal with SpaceX and correct “errors” in the procurement process, according to the protest. Absent...

The United States convened 40 heads of state in a virtual climate summit this week, with the goal of eliciting commitments from attendees for radical reductions in carbon emissions. The U.S. pledged 50% reduction below 2005 levels by 2030, and others announced their own new targets — with the overall goal of putting the planet on track to carbon neutrality by 2050, the minimum needed to...

Sian Proctor may owe her life to Apollo 11—literally. Born in Guam—the daughter of an engineer who worked at the local tracking station that helped NASA maintain communications with its lunar crews—she was the fourth child of a couple that she suspects did not plan for so many kids, and came into the world just nine months after Apollo 11 stuck its historic first moon landing....

Rockets are built slowly—slowly and exceedingly carefully—which is in keeping with giant machines on which humans stake their lives and nations stake their prestige. In NASA’s cavernous Vehicle Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral, America’s next great moon rocket—the Space Launch System (SLS)—is being constructed with all that in mind. It is here too that TIME...

When he was a child, James Owuor loved hearing the elders talk about the way life used to be. So it comes as something of a surprise that at 38, he is now the one tasked with the job of describing the Before Times in Kenya’s Rift Valley. Before Lake Baringo started to rise, before…

Forty years ago, as I was leaving my friend’s house to throw a baseball outside, his father stopped us for inspection. “Where are you going?” Peter’s father asked. “When will you be back?” And most pointedly: “Have you done your homework?” Peter had, but I had not. “I’ll get around to it,” I said. “Ah, well, here you...

However differently we register this pandemic we understand it as global; it brings home the fact that we are implicated in a shared world. The capacity of living human creatures to affect one another can be a matter of life or death. Because so many resources are not equitably shared, and so many have only a small or vanished share of the world, we cannot recognize the pandemic as global...

The COVID-19 pandemic, like the climate crisis, is amplifying existing racial and gender injustices in our society. TIME editors Naina Bajekal and Elijah Wolfson moderated a conversation with two women working to create a more inclusive climate leadership space: American author, strategist and teacher Katharine Wilkinson, who co-founded and leads The All We Can Save…

In an earlier era, green referred to grass and trees and jealous eyes. But over the past half-century, green has taken on a life of its own. The Green movement deals with the collisions and contagions of the contemporary world—how to view them, and how to cure them. The book from which this essay is excerpted, The Spirit of Green, examines a wide array of social, economic and political...

American tailpipes have played an outsized role in global warming. In 2019, transportation accounted for 29% of the country’s human-generated emissions, the most of any sector tracked by the Environmental Protection Agency—and the U.S. is the world’s second-largest carbon emitter. The Biden Administration wants to clean up transportation’s dirty reputation, and make...

Mars is a lousy place to try to fly a helicopter. There’s the temperature, for one thing—a paralyzing -90º C (-130º F), frigid enough to cause nearly any machinery to freeze up and lock. There’s the remoteness too; Mars is currently 287 million km (178 million mi.) from Earth, meaning that radio signals, even moving at light speed, take nearly 16 minutes to travel...

1171 Shoreham looks much like it did when Anna Zimmerman lived there: modest but presentable. A good starter home for Zimmerman and her husband when they bought it in 2005, for a while it provided an idyllic existence in suburban Charleston, S.C., a community of friendly neighbors for their young child, a quaint backyard and even…

Last summer, I wrote a short story entitled Rat Island, set in a post-pandemic United States. In it, the rule of law and social order have broken down, with mobs roaming the streets of Los Angeles. A wealthy group of people stand on top of a skyscraper, waiting for the helicopter that will whisk them away, but the crowd storms the building, desperate to board. In the fall of 2020 my agent...

On Jan. 19, 2006, the Earth lost half a ton. More precisely, it lost 1,054 lbs (478 kg), but it’s O.K. to round down, since the 13 octillion-pound planet hardly noticed the missing weight. The flyweight fleck of matter was very much born of the planet, a collection of metal and silicon and copper and rubber and plastics and foil and a bit of plutonium hammered together into the New...

In 2018, Scott McCaulay had a “Wizard of Oz moment.” He was a final-year architecture student at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland when the U.N. published a report warning that the world had 12 years to transform society to avoid catastrophic, irreversible climate change. Buildings, the report said, account for 20% of energy-related global greenhouse-gas emissions, and the...

We heard about the storm a week before the rains. Manny figured they wouldn’t be a problem. Jae disagreed. The news called it a minor inconvenience—a flash flood at most—but we’d learned not to lean too deep into forecasts. In the morning, Houston felt sticky. Our heels slapped across the floorboards. We plodded around the house, yawning and stretching and tugging at our...

The globalization of manufacturing has transformed some of the world’s poorest nations to unprecedented levels of economic prosperity. But the resulting increase in poorly controlled emissions and eco-degradation has caused unsustainable levels of local air and water pollution, destabilizing the climate and threatening biodiversity. Just as the vast development of technology hastened...

Nature and climate are inextricably linked. Nature loss drives climate change and vice versa. Right now, both are in crisis. Repairing our natural climate—reversing deforestation, for example, or conserving ecosystems to sequester and store carbon—addresses both these crises. So-called natural climate solutions are one of the most important and cost-effective ways to stay on track...