We made the crossing at night from Chamoli, reaching Okund, a Himalayan foothill town after dark. The innkeeper, anxious for guests in a travel economy that came to a standstill in mid-June, cooked dal and nan bread for dinner and then showed us to a room that was unlit and unheated.

“Leave enough for everyone.” That’s what my mother used to tell us at dinner. However, the holiday season reminds me that human nature is far from innately moderate in consumption. With Black Friday as a kickoff, consumers will spend more than $600 billion by Christmas in the United States alone. As I witness droves of shoppers running through malls and stores, I wonder if their desire is driven by some insatiable appetite for their favorite products or something more fundamental about human nature.

The original version of this article, by Lisa Palmer, appeared on The Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media.

Humans, it’s no secret, are versatile and unpredictable in how they use their land. We build mega-cities in deserts, raise crops on flood plains, live along vulnerable coast lines enjoying seas dangerously rising, and burn rain forests to create new pastures.

In Petro-Aggression: When Oil Causes War, Jeff Colgan provides an indispensable starting point for researchers interested in the relationship between oil and international conflict.

In the latter half of last century, Thailand and other East Asian countries successfully capitalized on shifts in their age structures to gain a boost in economic productivity, a phenomenon known as the demographic dividend. Today, despite the hitherto sluggish pace of Africa’s demographic transition, scholars and politicians remain hopeful that similar changes on the continent may lead to faster development in coming decades. [Video Below]

Last month, two Chinese fishing boats were caught operating illegally in South Korean waters. The incident made local headlines and minor diplomatic waves, but it’s just a drop in the bucket in what has become a troubling trend for China’s foreign water fishing fleets. Over the last decade, there have been more than 4,600 cases of Chinese fishing boats being caught illegally in South Korea’s waters alone, according to the government, and these marine transgressions have not been limited to neighbors.