sustainability
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Incredible NASA images of Saudi Arabia’s careless use of water
NASA released satellite images showing that the Saudis are irrigating the desert in order to grow food -- with fossil water that accumulated during the last Ice Age and will be gone completely in 50 years.
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The Onion suggests we figure out pretty fast who we need to kill
The Onion reports that scientists have figured out the definitive solution to overpopulation, resource depletion, and environmental carnage: We just need to kill off a third of the human race. Who wants to go first?
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Organic food is not always sustainable food
Good food, as we've come to know it in that last few years, has a few characteristics: It's local. It's grown using responsible, land-loving techniques, like crop rotations and polycultures. And it's organic, raised without chemical fertilizers and poison pesticides. At one point, “organic” was shorthand for all of that, because the same people who cared enough to grow their vegetables with manure cared about environmental sustainability and tended to be local.
But now “organic” can be shorthand only for adherence to a certain set of rules that outlaw certain concentrations of certain types of fertilizers and pesticides, and as the New York Times points out, it sometimes doesn't mean much else. -
Ask Umbra: Is it safe for Occupy groups to use wooden pallets?
Send your question to Umbra! Q. Dear Umbra, Our Occupy group is looking for information regarding the safety of using wooden pallets. They want to use them under tents, to help stay drier, and possibly to burn (for heat only, not for cooking). I found a Grist article on pallets from a few years ago, […]
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An aging rust belt town becomes a laboratory for sustainability
Environmental Studies professor David OrrPhoto: Lisa DeJongThis story is the first of two pieces excerpted from a feature story in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Read part 2 here and the full Chronicle story here. Oberlin, Ohio — This northern Ohio college town is barely a blip on a map, far away from national centers […]
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Energy from U.S. forests: mostly unsustainable according to peer reviewed study in Nature
A peer reviewed paper in the November 2011 issue of Nature/Climate, shows that, at least in the U.S., biofuel production from forestry results in higher carbon emissions than not producing biofuel in most cases. Even just increasing fire management, removing biomass that acts as tinder, will result in a net reduction in forest sequestration in […]
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Talking to my son about sex and sustainability
"Are we going to talk about sex again?!" screamed my 12-year-old son. I had just sat down with him to have one of our father-son talks.
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Is a centralized climate solution still possible? And more from my chat with Andy Revkin
David Roberts had an interesting chat with Andy Revkin of The New York Times on climate policy and the prospects for a sustainable future.