May 17, 08
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
Guest Editorial: Water Trading in China: A Step Toward Sustainability
by Yingling Liu In recent years, scarcity and pollution of water have become the paramount environmental woe in China. Numerous reports and books have exposed China's water crisis, depicting a nation suffering in the face of black-running rivers and...
Utilities and Auctions: There Is No Free Power Lunch
by Clark Williams-Derry and Alan Durning From the Sightline Institute's Daily Score An economy-wide cap on climate warming emissions – our preferred climate policy – has one enormous sticking point: once the cap is in place, who gets the right...
Collaboration Calls for New U.N. Agency to Oversee Transport Emissions
A newly formed watchdog of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is proposing that the U.N. establish a new authority to regulate emissions from high-carbon international activities such as aviation and shipping. The International Scientific and...
Biopiracy in Art and Literature
by Regine Debatty Back in July, while I was visiting Documenta 12 in Kassel, I saw a 16-metre-long flower-bed raised above the ground, with 70 packets of seeds sprouting from the grass, each of them carrying worrying labels that documented...
Gin, Television, and Social Surplus
by Clay Shirky I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin. The...
Cities of the Future, Today
As cool as ultra high-performance green buildings are individually, the real action is all with districts. Individual buildings may blaze paths, and as we engage in acupunctural infill (changing sprawling or underused areas into walkable, compact mixed-use communities by adding...
How the West was warmed
by Eric de Place There was some hubbub a couple of weeks ago when researchers produced a carbon emissions map of the US. Using direct CO2 emissions, we saw this first-of-its-kind map: Unfortunately, the map looks a lot like a...
Conservationists Map Madagascar’s Exotic Wildlife
By Ben Block A trip to the island nation of Madagascar is often likenedto a journey into another world. Many of its species are found nowhere else on Earth, isolated within the country's jagged cliffs and dense tropical forests. For...
Interview with Bart Hess
I discovered the work of Bart Hess just a year ago, at the Salone del Mobile 2007. The video of his graduation project A Hunt for Hightech was shown as part of Family of Form, the exhibition that the Design...
The Top Stories, Earth Day 2008
On previous Earth Days, readers were sure to expect some startling statistics about pollution, global climate change and environmental destruction from most mainstream newspapers. But on Earth Day 2008, we at Worldchanging noticed that much of this year's coverage was...
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