Public Health Landscape

How Your Plate Affects Your Planet

Diet and Climate | November 2025

Humanity’s growing demand for animal meat is driving a planetary crisis, accelerating climate change, devastating ecosystems, and threatening public health.

Two grim, almost surreal, 26-story buildings tower over the southern outskirts of Enzhou, about 500 miles west of Shanghai in China’s Hubei province. No one would mistake them for apartment complexes despite their neat grid of window-like slots. Indeed, their main inhabitants are not human at all. The buildings are designed specifically to meet the biological and reproductive needs of 600,000 pigs each. Here they will be bred, farrowed, fattened, and finally slaughtered to meet the exploding animal protein needs of China, which consumes half the world’s pork and is also its biggest pork producer.

It is the world’s largest vertical pig farm, designed to manufacture 54,000 tonnes of pork every year. The building’s design reflects its unique function. Each of its six giant elevators can hoist a load of 10 tons, or about 100 pigs, at a time. Every utility and process, from the building’s water supply, electricity, and air conditioning, to its automatic feeding machines and smart air filtration and disinfection systems, can be monitored and controlled centrally from a NASA-like command center on the first floor. A stupendous amount of pig manure is processed daily in a biogas-driven waste treatment system and turned into electricity for lighting and heating the buildings. About 400 such ‘pig-rises’ could meet a part of China’s and the world’s growing appetite for animal proteins.

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Diet and Climate | November 2025

Gidon Eshel: The Diet Disruptor

Dr. Gidon Eshel is not the kind of climate scientist who limits his attention to melting glaciers or atmospheric physics. Trained as a physical oceanographer at Columbia University and later a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard, Eshel has spent the past two decades changing how the world understands the environmental footprint of food.

Now a Research Professor at Bard College and a Visiting Scholar at Harvard’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, he has become one of the most influential voices connecting daily dietary choices with global ecological outcomes.

With work in geophysics, agriculture and nutrition, Eshel offers a rare, systems-level view of how what we eat shapes the planet. His research has demonstrated, with striking clarity, that food is not merely a personal or cultural matter, but a driver of land use, water demand, and greenhouse gas emissions on a scale that challenges transportation and energy systems.

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Reforesting the Planet, Restoring the Future

Reforestation | October 2025

The preservation of the planet’s biodiversity relies entirely on how we manage and interact with the world’s forests.

Reforestation is a critical strategy for mitigating climate change because it increases the Earth’s capacity to absorb carbon dioxide (CO₂) – the main greenhouse gas driving global warming – while also enhancing ecosystem resilience.

In particular, we look at recent studies investigating the most cost-effective approaches to reforestation and the mitigation of climate change. For many years, forest managers have been asking which is best: allowing forests to naturally regenerate, on the one hand, or to plant new forests?

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Reforestation | October 2025

Maya Lin: The Quiet Power of Design

When Maya Lin was just twenty-one, her quiet vision changed how a nation remembers. As an undergraduate at Yale, she submitted a class project to a national design competition. It was for a memorial for Vietnam War veterans. Her entry, a sleek wedge of polished black granite etched with the names of more than 58,000 fallen soldiers, was unlike anything the public had seen. Its simplicity sparked debate, but what some called too stark soon became one of America’s most intense and healing monuments.

Lin grew up in Athens, Ohio, surrounded by creativity and intellect. Her mother, a poet, and her father, a ceramic artist and art school dean, taught her to think across disciplines which became the foundation of her career. She often says her work lives “between boundaries – science and art, art and architecture, East and West.” That in-between space is where her designs find their quiet power, inviting reflection rather than demanding it.

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Reforestation | October 2025

Dr. Justina Ray: Listening to the Land

Dr. Justina Ray is not only protecting Canada’s wild spaces – she is about redefining how conservation itself is done. As President and Senior Scientist of Wildlife Conservation Society Canada, she has built a career that reaches far beyond field biology, asking what it truly means to sustain life across landscapes that shape both ecology and identity.

Her work has taken her to the tropical forests of Asia and Africa, the vast boreal and sub-arctic zones of Canada, and many places in-between guided by a singular conviction: science must serve the future of the living world.

Ray’s path into northern conservation began with questions rather than assumptions. How do wolverines and caribou survive when their ranges fragment? What happens when the climate itself becomes a moving target?

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Reforestation | October 2025

Protecting Earth’s Lungs

Forests act as the planet’s terrestrial lungs. They provide us with fresh air, clean water, beautiful vistas and a sanctuary for countless wildlife.

But, today, more than ever, our forests are facing unprecedented threats from disease, climate change, mad-made destruction and harmful pests.

Join this documentary as it follows a group of professionals that developed, tested and formulated today’s forest health strategies to preserve the legacy of one of the planet’s most important resources – and to help us better understand and appreciate why we need to protect our forests.

This is a story that affects us all.

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Reforestation | October 2025