"Sprawl" is one of the ugliest words in the American political lexicon. Virtually no one wants America's rural landscapes, farmland, and natural areas to be lost to bland, placeless malls, freeways, and subdivisions. Yet few of America's fast-growing rural areas have effective rules to limit or contain sprawl.

Oregon is one of the nation's most celebrated exceptions. In the early 1970s Oregon established the nation's first and only comprehensive statewide system of land-use planning and largely succeeded in confining residential and commercial growth to urban areas while preserving the...

Is it possible to see famines coming, to be prepared and to save possibly hundreds of thousands of lives? Or is this the wrong question? A famine is not a single natural catastrophe: it has different stages. Many societies have sophisticated strategies for coping - but these are becoming dramatically limited. Famine Early Warning System is about the people who are caught up in the process of famine. Peter Walker looks at how they perceive their predicament and what they do to avert mass starvation: and at what genuinely useful help can be offered in order to prevent irreversible disaster....