Phoebe Barnard, PhD

(Photo: Cristian Ibarra/Pixabay )

In a radical departure from the conservative language that normally defines science, 11,258 scientists from around the world have called for drastic climate action to “avoid untold suffering”.

Sounding the clarion call in high-impact jou...

Today, on Veterans' Day in the USA, I find myself thinking about the Baby Boom.

Like those of so many people born in the 1960s or 1950s, my parents married as wartime sweethearts.  My mother was 18, my father 24.  By 1945, when my eldest brother was born, hundreds of th...

What a tenuous time to be a parent. Is anyone else knocked off-course in this way?

To be a parent on the planet today, in the 21st century, sometimes feels like dancing in a careening circus of horrors - the age of climate crisis, the rise of far-right nationalism, inc...

Rome is burning.  It's been burning all my lifetime.  I was born in 1961 - only a year after most recent environmental baselines for comparison of our predicament.  As a childhood lover of trees, nature, wildness, creatures, volcanoes and adventure, I was destined to t...

A talk at the Boothbay Harbor Yacht Club, Maine, USA (illustrated from the original at http://winslowmyersopeds.blogspot.com/)

Vasili Archipov was an officer on a Soviet submarine near Cuba during the missile crisis of October 1962. American ships were dropping signalin...

 Metrorail runs along the Southern Route to Simons Town through St James, Kalk Bay, Fish Hoek and Glencairn.

[This 2008 article was first published in the free community glossy magazine "Full Circle." At the time, the Cape Town train service Metrorail was mostly safe, r...

December 4, 2017 — 10:45 AM

Homeward Bound brings dozens of powerful women in science together to solve environmental issues. Armed with the tagline "Mother Nature needs her daughters," the program has already organized the largest-ever female voyage to Antarctica, and...

On the battlefields of World War I, field medics were working under the most horrific of conditions.  Faced with a steady stream of desperately wounded soldiers, doctors and nurses had to take tough decisions to categorize their patients by who needed urgent care in or...

Do good lives – satisfying, purposeful, fun-filled – really have to 'Cost the Earth'? This is the theme, and title, of one of several wonderful books I read a few years ago (edited by A Simms and J Smith, published by Constable). It's an eclectic series of essays by we...

If, like me, you'd never flown into Sao Paulo at night on a clear evening, you'd probably not understand my reaction.  The city - monstrous, sprawling to all horizons, twinkling and colorful in the dark, with apartments lit up like encrusted gems - has an immediate sho...