This article is from the archive of our partner .
Discovery News on pandas Emily Sohn reports on how climate change is affecting the giant panda population in China's Qinling Mountains. The amount of bamboo will dramatically decline, therefore eradicating between 80 and 100 percent of "livable panda habitat" by the end of this century. Adding to the problem, as Sohn explains, is that the mountains holding nearly 20 percent of the world's wild giant pandas are isolated. If the pandas' food source goes away, the pandas cannot migrate anywhere.
Grist on local food for D.C. Jim Epstein and Mark Seale founded Blue Ridge Produce to create a for-profit "food hub much like the many that have sprouted up around the country to help the local food industry scale up in recent years," Whitney Pipkin writes. Pipkin adds, "the fact that this model is being seen as an investment opportunity says something about the stability, inevitability, and urgency of the local food market." Epstein and Seale want Virginia farms, mostly involved in meat and dairy production, to start growing and selling fruits and vegetables. That said, the food the two are selling is for the most part not organic, even though they say they "strive" to make it so.