environment
voltagegate | May 4, 2007It's beginning to look a lot like spring in Maryland, which means that the suburbanites will be out in their yards clearing dead brush and leaves, sculpting unkempt hedges and painstakingly homogenizing their lawns. I wrote this post last May, asking why lawns are treated like an extension of the carpet.
If I have to see another white middle-aged actor stroking "his" lawn, I'm going to (insert drastic measure here)!
Ortho's latest pesticide claims it will kill over 100 specific insect types on contact.
The problem is, there are a lot of invertebrates that keep a natural lawn in great shape.…
revere | May 3, 2007Nothing demonstrates the Bush administration's commitment to Family Values than the number of its officials who have resigned to spend more time with their family. The latest is Julie A. MacDonald, an Interior Department deputy assistant secretary in charge of the Fish and Wildlife Service's endangered species program. The context for her new interest in family matters is the usual one for Bushies: conflict of interest charges, providing internal documents to lobbyists and the arbitrary alteration of the findings of her own scientific professionals in the Interior Department.
MacDonald's…
grrlscientist | May 3, 2007tags: South Pacific Islands, Indonesia, rainforest destruction, environment
Southwestern region of the island nation, Indonesia. The pale land mass to the bottom, right is Australia while the pale region to the upper left is southeast Asia.
Image source.
Partially because many species of my research birds are endemic there, Indonesia is my most favorite country which I've never visited. So I am saddened and disturbed to learn that Indonesia is being awarded a rather dubious distinction. In fact, so tremendous is the destruction of its rainforests, that Indonesia will be listed in the 2008…
grrlscientist | May 3, 2007tags: Harry Potter, JK Rowling, books, environment
I have written about this once before, but like most good news, one never gets tired of repeating it. In this case, Harry Potter fans will be most pleased to learn that the last Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, will print a version that will contain a minimum of 30 percent post-consumer waste fiber. In short; this book will be forest-friendly.
Additionally, nearly two-thirds of the 16,700 tons of paper will be approved by the Forest Stewardship Council, an international organization with a mission to "promote…
j7uy5 | May 2, 2007The
Australian beer maker, Fosters, is installing a
href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/sns-ap-australia-beer-power,0,2942622.story?coll=chi-bizfront-hed">prototype
fuel cell. Nothing remarkable about that, except
this fuel cell uses wastewater from the manufacture of beer.
The carbohydrate-rich effluent is expected to generate 2
kilowatts and make the water cleaner in the process.
In tangentially-related news The BBC is reporting that hemp can be used
to produce eco-friendly concrete.
Production
of concrete, that staple of modern building, alone accounts for up to
10% of…
voltagegate | May 2, 2007Julie MacDonald, the Bush appointee accused of suppressing the Endangered Species Act last year has resigned after proof of her corruption was brought to light:
Julie MacDonald left her position as the Department of Interior's deputy assistant secretary of fish, wildlife and parks, from which she controlled the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service endangered species program.
Her resignation follows a finding March 29 by the agency's Inspector General Earl Devaney that she violated federal ethics rules by sending "nonpublic information" to industry lobbyists.
MacDonald repeatedly leaked internal…
voltagegate | May 1, 2007"All we have yet discovered is but a trifle in comparison with what lies hid in the great treasury of nature."
-Antoni van Leeuwenhoek
pharyngula | May 1, 2007Steve Milloy, junk science peddler and loser, has a new crusade: he is opposed to compact fluorescent light bulbs.
How much money does it take to screw in a compact fluorescent light bulb? About US$4.28 for the bulb and labour -- unless you break the bulb. Then you, like Brandy Bridges of Ellsworth, Maine, could be looking at a cost of about US$2,004.28, which doesn't include the costs of frayed nerves and risks to health.
Sound crazy?
Yes, Steve, it does sound crazy. It doesn't help that it's coming from you, either. Can we get more details on Brandy Bridges' story?
Uh-oh. It's World Net…
voltagegate | April 30, 2007From Ontario to Greece to Panama, what are participating bloggers finding out in the field? This thread will be constantly updated throughout the week, blog carnival style, compiling all of the bioblitzes that are being conducted. Please contact me if you have something up; I'll make sure I add it to the list.
Don't forget to check out all of the participant's photos at the Flickr group (over 300 photos now).
For info about the Blogger Bioblitz, follow the links:
Read more about the blitz
Visit the forum
See submission guidelines
Join the Flickr group
Find a field guide online
Download a…
sarahdasher | April 26, 20072050: Warming temperatures melt the glaciers off Kilimanjaro (and other equatorial mountains).
2100: Climate change drives a quarter of all plant and animal species to extinction.
2200: Melting ice changes the distribution of Earth's mass enough to actually speed the rotation of the Earth.
Dengue fever erupts worldwide! Coney Island washes into the sea!
LiveScience.com trawled the IPCC reports, NASA and World Bank documents, and Geophysical Research Letters for climate change predictions both ominous and whimsical.
Sure, it may sound like alarmism--but it's alarmism of the highest…
voltagegate | April 25, 2007Man, this game sucks. They show you what amounts to be an extra depressing trailer of An Inconvenient Truth and then unleashes you on the world - to stop emitting so much CO2.
Usually when a game is set in a post-apocalyptic world, you at least get a gun or a blade (or a gunblade) and have to undermine the oppressive, corrupt regime that has risen in the absence of order. In Planet Green Game, in the face of utter destruction, you take your car in for an oil change.
Everyone knows that the only good educational game ever made was Oregon Trail. Sure, my oxen always drowned while pulling a…
vhughes | April 23, 2007
In the urban metropolis, a small patch of rooftop garden is often the closest you can get to green landscape. But what if skyscraper roofs held not just geranium patches and brick patios, but full-scale farms that produced fruit and veggies year-round, generated clean energy, and purified wastewater?
Six years ago, Columbia University professor of environmental sciences and microbiology Dickson Despommier came up with a concept he calls "vertical farming" to alleviate the growing demand for farmland.
As the world gets warmer and more populated, Despommier says, we'll need to curb the…
j7uy5 | April 18, 2007
Add this to the list of environmental worries: The generation
of electricity is a highly water-intensive process. It takes
three times as much water to produce the electricity needed for a home,
than the water used in that home.
href="http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0417/p01s02-wogi.html">Trade-off
looms for arid US regions: water or power?
Water consumed by electric utilities could account for up to 60 percent
of all nonfarm water used in the US by 2030.
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">Albuquerque, N.M. - The
drive to build more power plants for a growing nation – as…
grrlscientist | April 17, 2007
The strawberry poison frog, Oophaga pumilio, is one of the species of amphibians and reptiles declining in the lowland forests of Costa Rica.
Image source: BBC News.
The recent decline in frogs and other amphibians has been blamed on a deadly fungus, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis. However, a paper was published this week that proposes another reason for the decline of frogs: there is less leaf litter on the forest floor than in years past.
This study, carried out in a Costa Rican rainforest, found that lizards, which are not susceptible to this fungus, are also decreasing by a similar…
ksharpe | April 17, 2007Today, New York City is wringing itself out after a late-season Nor'easter. Saturday, it dealt with another kind of flood. On April 14, a "Sea of People" dressed in blue and bearing boats, beach balls, and other watery accoutrements descended on lower Manhattan. They gathered in Battery Park at noon to hear brief speeches by community groups and leaders, and then fanned out along Church Street to the West and Pearl Street to the East, physically demarcating what would be Manhattan's new shoreline if sea levels were to rise by ten feet—a possible reality within the next hundred years according…
sarahdasher | April 12, 2007They sleep an average of 20 hours, and subsist on less than two pounds of gum leaves per day. Yet an absence of natural predators and extremely low metabolic demands may not be enough to keep Australia's koala population alive into the next century.
Development along Australia's coast is destroying the gum forests that koalas call home, and with the encroaching suburbs has come a population of dogs and cars that alternately munch on, and flatten, the bear-like marsupials. On top of all this, the past few years have ushered in the worst drought in Australian history, igniting a series of…
mikethemadbiologist | April 10, 2007I've mentioned the National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System (NARMS) before. Today, I'll be attending the NARMS public hearing which is going to discuss four questions:
1) Why, on this night
1) Are there inherent biases in the sampling strategies employed in NARMS? If so, how can they be improved to ensure that the data and interpretation are scientifically sound given current resources?
2) Are there epidemiological and/or microbiological research studies that would better serve the goals of NARMS and the regulatory work of FDA?
3) Are current plans for data harmonization and…
pharyngula | April 9, 2007We have a new scienceblog here, Shifting Baselines, authored by Jennifer Jaquet and associated with Randy Olson's Shifting Baselines Ocean Media Project. She has already opened up shop with an absolutely horrible, conflicting argument:
Should We Continue to Eat Seafood?
"But it tastes so good," I whimper.
Al Gore slaps me to the floor and kicks me in the ribs a few times. "But it's bad for overfished oceans!"
I don't know what to do. I'd have fish or some nice marine invertebrate every night for dinner, but I have a different constraint: my wife and daughter are not fans. About the only time…
ksharpe | April 9, 2007If you've ever complained that the kids today just don't understand how things used to be in the good old days, then you've grasped the concept of shifting baselines.
The phrase, coined by University of British Columbia's Fisheries Centre Director Dr. Daniel Pauly in 1995, refers to the way that as reality changes over time, peoples' standards change along with it. The way things are today begins to seem natural, like the way things have always been. The 'shifting baselines' effect masks change—in Pauly's example, it hides the creeping progress of environmental degradation.
Marine biologist…
clock | April 5, 20072007 TED Prize winner E.O. Wilson on TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Talks:
As E.O. Wilson accepts his 2007 TED Prize, he makes a plea on behalf of his constituents, the insects and small creatures, to learn more about our biosphere. We know so little about nature, he says, that we're still discovering tiny organisms indispensable to life; and yet we're steadily, methodically, vigorously destroying nature. Wilson identifies five grave threats to biodiversity (a term he coined), and makes his TED wish: that we will work together on the Encyclopedia of Life, a web-based compendium of…