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Justin Brice Guariglia: A Visual Provocateur
tin Brice Guariglia moves fluidly between art, science, and activism, all the while creating work that pushes its viewers to face the realities of a rapidly shifting planet. His practice grows out of collaborations with scientists, writers, and thinkers.
Guariglia’s perspective was transformed in 2015, when he joined NASA missions over Greenland to document its melting ice sheets. Seeing the scale of change firsthand reshaped his artistic direction and led to deeper partnerships with climate researchers. These experiences have since fed into everything from large-scale public installations to digital projects exploring sea-level rise. His ongoing work with research institutions and climate-focused organizations shows his genuine commitment to bridging scientific knowledge and public understanding.
Your Grass-fed Burger isn’t Better for the Planet
For years, ranchers and some conservationists have argued that grass-fed beef is better for the planet than conventional cattle.
But a study published [March 2025] in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences challenges that idea, finding that cattle raised only on pastures do not have a smaller carbon footprint than feedlot cattle, which are quickly fattened on corn and other grains. This held even when the researchers took into account that healthy pastureland can help capture more carbon by pulling it out of the air and storing it in roots and other plant tissues.
How Your Plate Affects Your Planet
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.
7 Steps to a More Sustainable Diet
Here are seven steps to a more sustainable diet.
Did you know that food production contributes about 21-37% of human-caused emissions?
To reduce your climate impact, eat more plant-based foods and reducing meat and dairy consumption, as these require fewer resources and produce fewer greenhouse gases.
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.
Our Broken Planet: How to heal our rainforests
Breathe in. Breathe out. The oxygen flowing through your body is the result of photosynthesis: the natural process through which living things convert sunlight into energy. About 30% of land-based photosynthesis happens in tropical rainforests. Rainforests are also great at sucking up excess carbon from the atmosphere – something we know we’ve got to do more of.
But in recent years, rainforests have been getting constricted: shrinking in size and choked up with smoke.
Listen to this podcast from the National History Museum to find out what’s going on and how we can help rainforests breathe deeply again.
The Age of Firestorms
Dr. Roslyn Prinsley never imagined that stepping outside her home in Canberra would feel like walking into a smoke-filled abyss. But during Australia’s devastating bushfire season in 2019-2020, even in places untouched by flames, the air was so thick with smoke that breathing felt impossible.
“I asked myself, what are we doing here in the 21st century? We can’t actually go outside and breathe fresh air in one of the cleanest countries in the world,” she remembers thinking. “We can’t let this keep going.”
Dr. Roslyn Prinsley is the Head of Disaster Solutions at the Australian National University’s Institute for Climate, Energy & Disaster Solutions (ICEDS). Finding innovative ways to fight wildfires is part of her daily work – a task that has become more urgent than ever as wildfires grow increasingly frequent in Australia and across the globe due to climate change.
Wildfires are projected to rise 30% by the end of 2050, according to a report by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and its partner GRID-Arendal.
One of the recent wildfires in California became the most destructive in Los Angeles history, killing at least 29 people—a number expected to rise—and reducing over 10,000 homes to ash. A perfect set of environmental factors such as long-term drought, preceding heavy rainfall, and hurricane-force Santa Ana winds combined at the worst possible moment.
All of this turned the regular wildfire into what’s called a firestorm.
Inside the L.A. Firestorm
The 2025 LA Wildfires were among the most destructive and costly in U.S. history, driven by a combination of shifting climate patterns and growing development in fire-prone areas. As these types of fires become more common, it raises important questions about how we prepare for and respond to future risks. In this PBS video, experts explore the factors behind the firestorm and what can be done to reduce the impact of similar events going forward.
Jacques Régnière: Budworm to BioSIM
Jacques Régnière, born in Quebec City, has dedicated over four decades to advancing our understanding of forest pests and protecting our global forests. Earning his bachelor’s degree in biology from Laval University and a Ph.D. in insect ecology and biomathematics from North Carolina State University, Régnière began his career at the Canadian Forest Service in 1980, where he served until his retirement in 2024.
Throughout his distinguished career, Régnière focused on pressing issues in forest ecology, notably the population dynamics of the spruce budworm, mountain pine beetle, and spongy moth. His work in quantitative ecology has influenced pest management practices and provided a better understanding of climate change’s impact on invasive species and forest health.
The Role of Technology in Forest Management
In Brazil’s Pará region, new roads are cutting through the pristine Amazon rainforest, opening up once-untouched areas to human activities. Expansive stretches of lush greenery are vanishing at an alarming pace, yielding to barren patches and freshly cleared land.
Meanwhile, far into space, the European Space Agency captures high-resolution satellite images of the region that unveil an important pattern: deforestation occurs predominantly near these newly constructed roads.
Back in 2016, it sparked a question: what if there were a tool to monitor these roads and forecast potential deforestation areas? Not long after PrevisIA was born.
In 2021, Microsoft with Vale Fund and the Amazon Institute for Man and the Environment (Imazon) developed a new AI tool called PrevisIA, to predict deforestation hotspots in the Amazon. Using satellite imagery from the European Space Agency and an algorithm developed by Imazon, the tool produces heat maps showing the most exposed conservation areas, Indigenous lands, and other settlements, along with rankings for states and municipalities.