U.S. Forces Are Leaving a Toxic Environmental Legacy in Afghanistan

As U.S. forces withdrew from Afghanistan, the Taliban immediately rushed in, and it recently took over the country’s major cities in just a few days. The end of the two-decade American occupation has not only produced a fraught political situation; it has also created an environmental one. Some of the military bases the U.S. handed … Read more

Richard Leakey’s Legacy in Science, Conservation and Politics

Richard Leakey, paleoanthropologist, conservationist and Kenyan political leader, died January 2 at his home near Nairobi. His expeditions discovered hundreds of hominin fossils, leading Fred Spoor, a paleoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London to tell me his findings were “a most extensive and diverse fossil record of early human evolution.” Other scientists, conservationists, … Read more

Biologist E. O. Wilson Dies at 92. His Legacy Is More Critical Now Than Ever

E. O. Wilson was an extraordinary scholar in every sense of the word. Back in the 1980s, Milton Stetson, the chair of the biology department at the University of Delaware, told me that a scientist who makes a single seminal contribution to his or her field has been a success.   By the time I … Read more