Currently viewing the tag: "ecology"
Carl Safina’s detailed TED talk on the fate of the Gulf of Mexico explores some of the unseen victims and impacts of the BP oil spill. He demonstrates how dispersants have made the spreading oil slick into an unrecoverable mess that is too pervasive and too blended to be cleaned. Fresh from a visit to the Gulf, Safina explains that the ongoing environmental disaster is building in severe biological trauma to the ecosystem of the entire hemisphere.
NOW, with David Brancaccio, travels to the Indian Himalaya, to examine the problem of persistent accelerating ice melt which is speeding the erosion of glaciers that feed the Ganges River, which in turn provides water for hundreds of millions of people and sustains a precarious but massive food economy.
The new stadium built for the World Games 2009, located in Taiwan’s Kaohsiung City, is being hailed as a landmark example of environmentally friendly building design. The stadium is rimmed with a partial canope roof that trails off into the surrounding promenade and is clad in 8,844 solar-voltaic panels, to generate electricity. The solar complex [...]
The book Plan C: Community Survival Strategies for Peak Oil and Climate Change addresses the problem of resource depletion and the degradation of our environmental base by illustrating how community erosion due to a culture of excess leaves human society without adequate means of planning for a world in which exponential growth is not the norm. Resource depletion already means the endless expansion of resource consumption is not possible, so author Pat Murphy proposes a localized community-oriented approach to overhauling the prevailing economic paradigm.
Earlier this year UNEP, UNDP and the World Bank teamed up with World Resources Institute to publish a report focusing on the concept of resilience “for cushioning the impacts of climate change and delivering continuing benefits to the poor”. Recently, the Volvo Environment Prize was given to the “father of resilience theory”, C.S. Holling. But what is this resilience-thing really all about? We thought it was about time to try to sort this concept out once and for all.
When Henry David Thoreau published Walden, a narrative of his experiences and meditations near Walden Pond, in the densely wooded hill country of Massachusetts, it was a breakthrough treatise on the role of human industry and individual will in terms of the natural environment. Thoreau infused an explanation of day to day existence with a transcendental consciousness of the value of the natural world around him, and explored the manner in which human civilization is both habitually divorced from and irrefutably dependent upon that environment.
The chairman of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Stephen Johnson, says the Clean Air Act is “ill-suited” to fighting the greenhouse effect, and that Congress should pass laws mandating the regulation of carbon emissions, with global warming in mind. The move may lead to a more comprehensive regulatory regime, but as the Guardian newspaper notes: “Last year’s Massachusetts v. EPA Supreme Court ruling had found that greenhouse gases can be regulated under the U.S. Clean Air Act. The decision pressured the EPA to reconsider its refusal to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from new cars and trucks.”
During the concluding half of the last century, the world was making steady progress in reducing hunger, but during the transition into the new century, the tide began to turn. In February 2007, James Morris, head of the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP), announced that 18,000 children are now dying each day from hunger and related causes. For perspective, this loss of young lives in one day is almost five times U.S. combat deaths in Iraq through four years of fighting. Although these huge numbers of dying children may be an abstraction, each represents a young life ended far too soon.
Reforestation is a necessary part of the process of any ecologically responsible development strategy. Forest cover is not only a potent natural resource feeding the overall resilience of an ecosystem, but the hydrological and soil-quality stability, along with the biodensity it can generate, mean it is now more clear than ever that natural levels of forest cover have a very high economic value over the long term.
The ongoing transition to an environmentally sustainable economy, focusing on energy and agricultural resources, is already opening the door to a range of new industrial and engineering services related to resource and ecosystem resilience (now understood to be vital to the stability of the natural environment whose own services underpin every element of our civilization).
The private investment fund Ceres, a group of institutional investors, has promised to devote $10 billion to investment in clean energy sources. The news comes as 3 of the world’s major oil companies call for coordinated policy on how to face climate change, constrain emissions, and a couple of months after 150 global corporations asked for a major boost in subsidized research into transitioning to clean energy technologies.
At a meeting of European scientists, in Stockholm, Sweden, the man who coined the term ‘anthropocene’ to describe the new geological epoch in which human influence dominates natural processes, announced that the term has gained acceptance in a growing number of fields. The real import of the term, and of its increasing relevance to what science is showing about the effects of human civilization on the environment, globally, is that ecological information is increasingly vital to implementing human ambitions in a responsible and sustainable way.
Ecologist and researcher Lester Brown, founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute, has issued the 3rd installment of his ‘Plan B’ books —Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (2008)—, which lay out the most vital research underlying and the most optimal means of meeting the need to transition to a sustainable economy that not only works in harmony with natural system, but also helps to reverse the excesses of the existing industrial model.
A new study has shown that raindrops can be used to produce electricity. The key is the mechanical energy of the raindrops, meaning the energy contained in their motion and in the way that force is diffused when striking a given type of surface.In this case the surface is PVDF (polyvinylidene diflouride) plastic, which is able to release a charge when temporarily “deformed” by mechanical activity, such as being struck by a moving object. A sheet of PVDF just 25 micrometers thick (1,000 = 1 milimeter) receives the impact of raindrops, and the effect is the release of energy, which can be harvested and turned into electricity.
The ‘Davos Conversation’ is a multimedia effort to bring online public together with major policy-makers, activists and economists, to broaden the scope of debate at the World Economic Forum. The question which was used as a platform for the online forum was “what one thing would make the world a better place?”
At the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, a range of ideas from international disease relief, healthcare, security, climate change, extreme poverty, and the responsibility of market incentives, took the discussions in a new direction. Fmr. US vice-president Al Gore spoke of the need for a “marriage” of policy regarding extreme poverty and the climate crisis.
Due to the science we already have, the laws we have to govern our own activity and to force government to act for the public health, we face the real possibility of being forced, in American courts, in the future, to pay for damage done to the most affected populations in other parts of the world, as a result of inaction by our government. And if not in court, then as a matter of the de facto urgencies of international political stability.
Examining the manner in which financial news is reported in the popular media, HotSpring proposes to create a system whereby live-update, rss-technology, and financial and editorial expertise, come together to produce a reliable up-to-the-minute resource for evaluating broad economic trends and engagements, without limiting analysis to single-parameter references like GDP or individual stock indices.
It is often thought that in order to organize ideas or to put some kind of order to any analysis, one needs uniformity, a limited number of generic categories and a single system of uncomplicated parameters by which to categorize each subject under review. But the truth is, this uniformity is not and will not be the rule of any part of lived reality.
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