By Zachary Shahan •
November 14, 2009
About two kilometers from the Dead Sea and two from where Jesus was christened, in the country of Jordan, Geoff Lawton of the Permaculture Research Institute and his crew created a near miracle turning desert into a lush permaculture garden.
In August in this location, Lawton says that temperatures could rise above 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit). People farming there were farming under plastic strips and using tons of synthetic chemicals and fertilizers. The idea to grow a lush forest or garden of edible plants would probably make people laugh or roll their eyes. Nonetheless, the permaculture crew had exactly this vision in mind and a little funding to help them to do it.
By Michael Ricciardi •
October 1, 2009
Most of us would consider a trip to a state or national park to be a chance to get away from the pollution that plagues our cities. But it’s seldom easy to escape the effects of urban and industrial air pollution. Now, with a new art project called ECLIPSE, the web viewer or park visitor can see real time air quality data “imposed” on the otherwise scenic landscapes of our state and national parks.
By Govind Singh •
September 9, 2009
Last week, the Internet celebrated its 40th birthday! Forty glorious years that saw not just the transition from ARPANet to the now popular Internet but also Web 2.0 and what not! The Internet has been a revolution–in the making! The Internet that we know of today has been around for a little over a decade. That is also the time period when awareness and action on the “global” climate crisis has been phenomenal. And the link, evident!
According to the Internet Governance Forum, Internet consumes up to one trillion kilowatt hours of electricity per year, amounting to around 5% of the world’s total electricity consumption. The ‘tools’ of the IT sector are also manufactured using metals of various kinds. So the question remains, can Internet really help solve the climate crisis? The answer, on behalf of a generation grown up with the Internet, a firm Yes!
Here are five ways how Internet is helping fight climate change:
By Mridul Chadha •
August 2, 2009
India is possibly looking to dodge the issue of mandatory emission reductions by announcing a variety of green schemes.
By Zachary Shahan •
July 30, 2009
International companies such as McDonald’s are happy, and companies like Nike, Wal-Mart and Carrefour are asking for more.
By Govind Singh •
July 21, 2009
“I See You, But Do You See Me??”
Alarmed with the almost daily reporting of rapidly declining tiger numbers and the inaction that follows, school children and several civil society groups in the Indian capital city of New Delhi are coming together to demand the basic right of the tiger–a Right to Survival. And in that, ensuring the survival of the entire human race. The Rally that follows a tiger consultation will also be a shift from all that has been done to all that needs to be done. As an organizer of the rally, comments like these are both inspiring and thought provoking.
By Gavin Hudson •
April 21, 2009
Trees for the Future, a US-based NGO, has planted 65 million trees in dozens of countries. And they’re still going.
For almost exactly 20 years now, Trees for the Future has been coaching farmers on sustainable agroforestry techniques. That’s a fancy way to say farmers can improving their soil and crop quality by planting trees around the farm. The trees help by holding in soil moisture and drawing water back to refill water tables, preventing erosion and improving soil fertility.
By Keith Rockmael •
April 17, 2009
If it works for one San Fran hotel then it must work for another. No, we’re not talking about more upscale mini bar items but Greening a hotel. In this case, the Orchard Garden Hotel’s (which garnered LEED-NC certification) sister property the Orchard Hotel just nabbed LEED-EB certification.
The Orchard represents San Francisco’s only hotel to earn this honor, the Orchard Hotel is the second hotel in California and fourth hotel in the world with this certification. The inspiration from these green hotels comes from its 85-year-old owner, Mrs. S.C. Huang, who has pushed her environmental agenda and created more environmentally safe and sustainable hotels after the untimely cancer-related deaths of three family members.
By Lester R. Brown
Protecting the earth’s nearly 4 billion hectares of remaining forests and replanting those already lost are both essential for restoring the earth’s health, an important foundation for the new economy. Reducing rainfall runoff and the associated flooding and soil erosion, recycling rainfall inland, and restoring aquifer recharge depend on simultaneously reducing pressure on forests and on reforestation.
There is a vast unrealized potential in all countries to lessen the demands that are shrinking the earth’s forest cover. In industrial nations the greatest opportunity lies in reducing the quantity of wood used to make paper, and in developing countries it depends on reducing fuelwood use.
The rates of paper recycling in the top 10 paper-producing countries range widely, from China and Finland on the low end, recycling 33 and 38 percent of the paper they use, to South Korea and Germany on the high end, at 77 and 66 percent. The United States, the world’s largest paper consumer, is far behind South Korea, but it has raised the share of paper recycled from roughly one fourth in the early 1980s to 50 percent in 2005. If every country recycled as much of its paper as South Korea does, the amount of wood pulp used to produce paper worldwide would drop by one third.
The use of paper, perhaps more than any other single product, reflects the throwaway mentality that evolved during the last century. There is an enormous possibility for reducing paper use simply by replacing facial tissues, paper napkins, disposable diapers, and paper shopping bags with reusable cloth alternatives.
By Lester R. Brown
In early December 2004, Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo “ordered the military and police to crack down on illegal logging, after flash floods and landslides, triggered by rampant deforestation, killed nearly 340 people,” according to news reports. Fifteen years earlier, in 1989, the government of Thailand announced a nationwide ban on tree cutting following severe flooding and the heavy loss of life in landslides. And in August 1998, following several weeks of record flooding in the Yangtze River basin and a staggering $30 billion worth of damage, the Chinese government banned all tree cutting in the upper reaches of the basin. Each of these governments had belatedly learned a costly lesson, namely that services provided by forests, such as flood control, may be far more valuable to society than the lumber in those forests.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the earth’s forested area was estimated at 5 billion hectares. Since then it has shrunk to just under 4 billion hectares, with the remaining forests rather evenly divided between tropical and subtropical forests in developing countries and temperate/boreal forests in industrial countries. Since 1990, the developing world has lost some 13 million hectares of forest a year. This loss of about 3 percent each decade is an area roughly the size of Greece. Meanwhile, the industrial world is actually gaining an estimated 5.6 million hectares of forestland each year, principally from abandoned cropland returning to forests on its own and from the spread of commercial forestry plantations. Thus, net forest loss worldwide exceeds 7 million hectares per year.
Unfortunately, even these official data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) do not reflect the gravity of the situation. For example, tropical forests that are clearcut or burned off rarely recover. They simply become wasteland or at best scrub forest, yet they still may be counted as “forest” in official forestry numbers. Plantations, too, count as forest area, yet they also are a far cry from the old-growth forest they sometimes replace.
