Jan 5, 09
Climate Change / Sustainable Development / Biodiversity and Ecosystems
New Science / Imagining the Future
From The Book
Planet: Introduction
Today, we are a planet on the move. According to the Population Resource Center, hundreds of millions of us have left the countries where we were born to start new lives abroad. Hundreds of millions more travel long distances for recreation and business. Jet contrails crisscross the skies, signals flash through fiber-optic cables, and the planet seems to shrink every day.
With all this travel, we've lost our connection to the land around us. Few of us could match the local ecological knowledge of our most ignorant ancestors. On the other hand, we've gained a greater understanding of the wider workings of nature.
image from NASA
Cap-and-Trade Shuts Down U.S. Coal Plants
Jubilant environmentalists trade high fives, carbon permits We tend to see a lot of handwringing over the fact that Europe has a carbon cap in place, yet they’re still adding coal to the mix. But stories like this never seem...
Climate Will Change Everything
From the discovery of intelligent life somewhere else to a web-based revolution in education, certain future milestones seem to hold the power to change everything that happens afterward. The online intellectual forum The Edge recently posted ideas about what...
Lazy Dystopias
Recently, I've been buried in a bumper crop of lazy dystopias. Now, I'm not against dystopian fiction as a means of social critique. Not at all. I think showing how present intentions may come to grief is necessary art. Not...
What if Climate Change is Not an Energy Problem?
Here's a thought I've been kicking around, and I'd like your ideas. What if, contrary to conventional wisdom, climate change is not actually primarily an energy problem, and by thinking of it as an energy problem, we risk making...
Chu, Browner, Holdren, Lubchenco: the Climate Superfriends
We need strong U.S. leadership on climate change, especially as we head into next year's COP-15 talks. President-elect Obama has already spoken more boldly (by far) on climate change than almost any other American elected official: There is often, however...
Resource: Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism
Throughout history, some architects have earned reputations as egoists who want to impose their ideals on culture through their massive structures. Industry masters are often viewed as untouchable, as few can afford their services. Not to mention, the majority...
Clean Development Mechanism in Flux
About 14 percent of CDM projects worldwide are wind energy projects. Almost 40 percent are located in China, pictured above. Emissions-reducing projects continued their steady rise across the developing world this year, with investments growing especially in China, according...
State Agency Calls for Ideas to "Climate-Proof" the Bay Area
Climate change is happening, and we now need innovative solutions for how to deal with its increasingly disastrous effects. One example of a way to help spur creative answers to climate change comes to us from California. The Bay Conservation...
Need a More Efficient Flight from Dubai to San Francisco? Good News...
Editor's note: Below is a post that Adam Stern at TerraPass recently shared with us. In our opinion, the accomplishment of the world's "longest green flight" is a dubious one, and we are wary of spreading false hope that the...
Global Warming Animated
Climate change is an enormously complex issue. Some scientists have dedicated their entire lives to researching it. They've discovered its causes (ahem, that'd be us) and have come up with some hypotheses about what will happen if we don't act...
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