KHOU reports a story from Houston, Texas about a 67-year-old man named Victor Ramos, who died on 24 June. His cause of death was hyperthermia - or overheating. According to his sister, Karla, Ramos had been let go from his job in March and couldn’t afford to fix his broken air conditioning unit.

The Washington Post reports that scientists have proposed Crawford Lake in Ontario, Canada as the symbolic starting point of the Anthropocene.

Carbon Brief has a story about new videos from NASA that show how CO2 is released into the atmosphere over the course of a year. When you read about CO2 emissions in plain numbers the figures can be hard to grasp, so these videos really bring the changing atmosphere to life.

Sustainability when out and about is probably the single area where consumers are the most well-informed, and the one that governments have taken the most action to regulate. So for now we’ll keep this section fairly brief. The key fact to keep in mind is that most plastic is derived from oil, and fossil fuel companies are betting on plastic to keep their profit margins intact should demand for oil as an energy source ever drop. So every time you say not to something made of plastic, you are sending a message to Big Oil that there products are no longer required.

We’ve previously talked about how the way our economic system works doesn’t properly account for natural resources. It essentially assumes that natural resources are bottomless and therefore can be endlessly exploited. We now know that isn’t the case, but perhaps one hangover from that failure of the market is that our recycling rate is abysmal. Only 9% of the plastic we have produced has been recycled and other materials aren’t much better. But everything we recycle doesn’t have to be sent to landfill, and can be used in place of extracting more natural resources from the planet.

Food is something we can’t live without, so by definition we can’t eliminate the environmental impact it has, we can only work to reduce it. Fortunately there is opportunity aplenty to do so - it is thought that our food production system is responsible for about 35% of our total greenhouse gas emissions. There are two main areas to start with when it comes to food - nutrition and food waste.

Here’s a few ideas for swaps you can make in your household cleaning routine to get rid of some of the plastic and chemical nasties that you might not realise you have in there.

Here’s a few ideas for swaps you can make in your haircare routine to get rid of some of the plastic and chemical nasties that you might not realise you have in there.

Here’s a few ideas for swaps you can make in your skincare routine to get rid of some of the plastic and chemical nasties that you might not realise you have in there.

Here’s a few ideas for swaps you can make in the bathroom to get rid of some of the plastic and chemical nasties that you might not realise you have in there.

Here’s a few ideas for swaps you can make in the kitchen to get rid of some of the plastic and chemical nasties that you might not realise you have in there.

Coexistence is about living in harmony with the natural world. And that’s how the suggestions that follow will be framed, not through the narrow prism of reducing our carbon footprint, but with the goal of living more sustainably, wasting less, and reducing our impact on the planet and the species we share it with. After all, think about your children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, and all of those yet to take their first steps on this planet. Don’t they deserve the same opportunities we have had? We’ll also discuss the ways in which these suggestions are beneficial to you, and the ways they might be able to save you a bit of money.

Public opinion surveys about climate change make for fascinating reading. One the one hand there is majority support for the idea that humans are the main cause of global warming. But once questions are asked about the actions required to mitigate climate change, the more individual sacrifice required to achieve reductions in greenhouse gas emissions the less support those actions are likely to have.

As an individual it can seem an overwhelming proposition to take action that will have a meaningful impact on the environmental crises we face. The truth is though, we as individuals, both as citizens and consumers, wield a lot of influence over governments and corporations and can encourage them to move away from business as usual to a new way of doing things.

As we enter the Fourth Industrial Revolution we need to recognise that the world we live in has changed, and the way that we measure our prosperity must too. We can no longer be consumed by infinite growth - the natural world has only finite resources and we must find a way to decouple economic progress and environmental degradation. Here’s how we can do it.

Since the steam engine was introduced in the 18th century and production was mechanized we have witnessed exponential growth in economic output and the longest sustained rise in living standards in human history. The catch is our good fortune has come at a significant cost to the environment.

Yesterday we talked about some of the health reasons for cleaning up our act environmentally. Yet another reason to preserve nature is we benefit from spending time in the outdoors.

One stereotypical view of an environmentalist is someone chained to a tree, prepared to risk their own safety to save another of nature’s creations. But even if you’re not moved by some of the arguments made yesterday, rest assured there are plenty of reasons to tackle the environmental crises we face from a perspective of self-interest too.

Over the past few days there has been a heavy focus on climate change, fossil fuels, and greenhouse gas emissions. Climate change is the environmental issue that gets the most attention because it is an existential crisis for our own species - if we aren’t able to get greenhouse gas emissions under control and stop global temperatures rising then we risk making the planet uninhabitable. But coexistence is about much more than reducing greenhouse gas emissions, it is about living in harmony with the natural world.

A couple of days ago we looked at country contributions to global greenhouse gas emissions on a per capita basis, which showed us which countries emitted the most greenhouse gases per person. But even that dataset doesn’t tell the full story, because as a general rule the wealthier someone is the higher their greenhouse gas emissions.