Revered for far more than its contribution to Indian civilization, the Ganges represents the goddess of salvation, Ganga. As a symbol of purity in Hindu mythology, the holy river is thought to cleanse believers both spiritually and physically with its waters.

TUTICORIN, India – Among the 75 government agencies that manage and regulate this bewitching and often impassioned nation, there is no Ministry of the Future. There should be.

From 1990 to 2013, the notorious tiger poacher Kuttu Bahelia and his extended family – brothers, uncles, and their wives and children – reportedly killed hundreds of tigers and leopards in the tiger-rich Indian states of Maharashtra and Karnataka, according to law enforcement informants and media reports. “Even if half that [estimate] is correct, it is still a very significant number,” says Belinda Wright, who directs the non-profit Wildlife Protection Society of India (WPSI).

The World Economic Forum’s 2017 Global Risks Report, like other recent analyses of global trends, notes “rising political discontent and disaffection,” but also significant concern for environmental issues. The forum polled 745 leaders, nearly half of whom are from the business community, on the likelihood and impact of various global risks.

Do you experience information overload? Feel like there’s always another crisis to worry about? Sense a kind of chaos? Well, you may be a citizen of the early 21^st century.

In Koyra Number 6, a coastal hamlet bordering the Sundarbans in southwestern Bangladesh, a group of men unload barrels of water from their trawlers – 50 drums holding 30 liters each. They announce their arrival by yelling. And word spreads. This is how this village gets their daily drinking water, from a town nine miles away.

Frank Morton has been breeding lettuce since the 1980s. His company offers 114 varieties, among them Outredgeous, which last year became the first plant that NASA astronauts grew and ate in space. For nearly 20 years, Morton’s work was limited only by his imagination and by how many different kinds of lettuce he could get his hands on. But in the early 2000s, he started noticing more and more lettuces were patented, meaning he would not be able to use them for breeding.

“Before the famine my life was better. I was a man in my own country,” Abdi Abdullahi Hussein, a Somali refugee living in Kenya, tells The Climate Reality Project. “When you have livestock and a farm and it all disappears, it feels like falling off a cliff.”