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A scientist chases penguins chased by climate change
University of Washington researcher Dr. P. Dee Boersma has spent nearly 40 years following her passion to learn about and protect penguins.Courtesy of Dee Boersma/Penguin Sentinels www.penguinstudies.org There once was a Michigan schoolteacher who gave her little girl a butterfly net and a suggestion: Every kid should have a hobby, could collecting insects be yours? […]
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‘Water’ author Stephen Solomon talks resource intelligence
Author Stephen Solomon recently suggested we need an “Al Gore of water” — a public champion to raise the profile of water scarcity threats and opportunities, as Gore has done for climate change. Solomon, an economics journalist, makes a bid for that role himself with his new book Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, […]
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Grist exclusive: A fiery battle over land in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest
On the Arapiuns River, barges of illegally taken timber smolder after being set aflame to protest logging in Gleba Nova Olinda, Amazon Rainforest. All photos: Brenda Baletti While world leaders were meeting in Copenhagen to address the challenge of climate change last month, indigenous and traditional Brazilians in the Amazon region were gathering to defend […]
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A water perspective on Copenhagen and beyond
How does improved water stewardship fit into cooling our planet? How well were the water-climate connections made at the recent Copenhagen climate deliberations? If you’re like me, you only have a lay person’s understanding of ecology — and global politics for that matter. But I do know that the CO2 reduction and carbon sequestration strategies […]
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China powers the global green tech revolution
Forget Red China. It’s Green China these days — at least when it comes to making big renewable deals. eSolar power plant. Friday night, a Chinese developer and eSolar of Pasadena, Calif., signed an agreement to build solar thermal power plants in the Mongolian desert over the next decade. These plants would generate a total […]
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Community-Owned Clean Energy
When I was a younger man than I am today, I had a vision of the Great Plains transformed: buffalo roaming across great tracts of tallgrass prairie studded with wind farms that powered the whole Midwest. Tribal communities, farmers and ranchers and young people all working together to develop an economy that could sustain the […]
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Clean Energy Business Zones: A tool for economic growth
Whether it was steel, the railroad, the automobile, or the Internet, America’s leadership in technological innovation has made it the world’s economic power for the last 100 years. Today, we’re on the brink of the next revolution with the transition to clean energy. Of course, new technologies inevitably push old ones aside — personal computers, […]
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Blair mountain scandal caps mountaintop removal mayhem
Who needs to go to the movie theater to watch Avatar and the horrors of ruthless extraction companies when we have our own bizarre mountaintop removal policies at play?
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Science confirms that blowing up mountains harms mountains
Scientists would shout this from the mountaintops, but …Photo: farukahmet via Creative CommonsLet’s say you trundle a bunch of enormous industrial equipment into North America’s oldest mountains (an intact temperate ecosystem boasting rich biodiversity, including a number of endangered species), clear-cut the forests, blow millions of tons off the top of the mountains, dump the […]
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With new year comes second chance to save the world
Just about exactly a year ago, patient readers with long memories may remember, I received a sobering New Year’s Day message. “Today,” it began arrestingly, “is arguably the first day of the most important year in human history.” Once again, the climate clock is ticking…The message — sent to a who’s who of top officials […]
