ecosystem

Giant LEGO wildlife is cooler than anything you made as a kid

The theme of the new installation at the Reiman Gardens, a massive public garden at Iowa State University, is “Nature Connects.” That usually means something about the complex interdependency of the ecological network and blah blah hippie stuff, but in this case it means nature literally snaps together out of LEGO bricks. And also blah […]

The best comic about industry and ecosystems you’ll ever read

Stuart McMillen, who wrote and drew that cool comic about reindeer on St. Matthew Island, has a new comic comparing human industry to ecological development after the Mt. St. Helens eruption. I know, it’s no gay X-Men wedding, but it’s really interesting! I promise!

‘Waking Mars’ is the most amazing game about gardening you’ll ever play

New iOS app “Waking Mars” is a game about gardening, botany, and ecology, which sounds boring — especially if you’re about my age, and your primary school teachers tried to get you to learn about ecosystems via some clunky games with Oregon Trail-level graphics where you controlled the number of fish or ducks or some […]

Why prison inmates make great conservationists

Kelli Bush, project manager for Washington state’s Sustainable Prisons Project, works with an unlikely group of conservationists: prison inmates. In collaboration with scientists, students, community groups, and prison staff, inmates at four Washington correctional facilities play an integral part in habitat and species restoration efforts. They raise Oregon spotted frogs (endangered in Washington), Taylor’s checkerspot […]

Morocco’s unique vulnerability to climate change

Morocco’s 2,175 miles of coastline makes it particularly vulnerable to sea level rise. With most of its economic activity near the coast, no legislation preventing building in the coastal zone and the government reportedly selling coastal land to developers at notional prices, climate change is a real threat. Small scale farmers increasingly find themselves competing […]

Is the debate over?

In the current issue of Science twenty-one leading ocean scientists declared a truce–it’s as if Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner agreed to stop the chase for a day. The paper was authored by many of the biggest names on all sides of the debate on ending overfishing–Boris Worm, Ray Hilborn, Andy Rosenberg and Chris Costello. […]

Learning from past civilizations

To understand our current environmental dilemma, it helps to look at earlier civilizations that also got into environmental trouble. Our early 21st century civilization is not the first to face the prospect of environmentally induced economic decline. The question is how we will respond. As Jared Diamond points out in his book Collapse, some of […]

Study finds “mass biodiversity collapse” at 900 ppm

In 2007, the IPCC warned that “as global average temperature increase exceeds about 3.5°C [relative to 1980 to 1999], model projections suggest significant extinctions (40-70% of species assessed) around the globe.”  On our current emissions path, we will warm far more than that this century, which suggests we risk the high end of species loss. […]