If you had to wager on whether a tree grows better in an urban setting or in a more natural environment, you would no doubt wager on the latter. But you would be wrong. It turns out that trees grow faster in cities than in rural areas. Or so say…

Felix Finkbeiner is 19 years old and in many ways he is just like your average teen. He is gawky and scrawny, wears rimmed spectacles, and has a ready smile. Yet the German teenager is already a world-famous conservationist who has set himself a mighty goal: to plant a trillion trees around the world….

It’s easy to get despondent about the state of the environment – and not without good cause. Many natural habitats are increasingly threatened, many species have been driven to the edge of extinction, and environmental pollution has continued unabated. But now here is some good news: Malaysian forests are doing…