California will require that new homes include their own solar panels beginning in 2020, state officials announced Wednesday in the latest step to position the state as the leader in clean energy.
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According to the National Phenology Network (NPN), a biological research organization that works with the US Geological Survey to track the cyclical behavior of plant life across the country, this year has been marked by an unusually warm winter, which has led plants to begin spring rhythms very early. With each new leaf index map the NPN releases, the region of the country that’s experiencing a premature spring has grown including Maryland and Virginia — spring is already here. On the most recent one, released, Monday, that region includes New York.
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Outdoor clothing company Patagonia has released a new short film to advocate for the legalization of industrial hemp in the U.S. The multipurpose plant, which has been used for centuries to make rope, textiles, foods, personal care products and more, became a controversial substance in 1937 due to the “Marihuana Tax Act,” which basically lumped hemp with marijuana and made it illegal to grow even though the former has no psychoactive properties. However, there are plenty of reasons why industrial hemp should be legalized, from its substantial health benefits to its potential to lower the environmental impacts of textile production.
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Presenting scientific research and his own observations in highly anthropomorphic terms, the matter-of-fact Mr. Wohlleben has delighted readers and talk-show audiences alike with the news — long known to biologists — that trees in the forest are social beings. They can count, learn and remember; nurse sick neighbors; warn each other of danger by sending electrical signals across a fungal network known as the “Wood Wide Web”; and, for reasons unknown, keep the ancient stumps of long-felled companions alive for centuries by feeding them a sugar solution through their roots.
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It’s a cloudy, gray day along the coast of Virginia, and several people wearing waders are knee-deep in the tide. They peer down at the oyster bed below, while one crew member pokes around with a long That’s actually a GoPro in the water, and the woman running the show isn’t a marine biologist, but a communications guru with the blue-tinted horn-rimmed glasses to match. It so happens that Julia Roberson, with her bleached-blonde, Bieber-swept hair and Southern twang, is conservationists’ secret weapon against ocean acidification. Roberson, 35, is perhaps an unlikely savior of the seas. Yes, she now directs the acidification program at the Ocean Conservancy, a leading environmental nonprofit in D.C., but her CV is pure PR, leaping from an early career in glossy magazines to a key player in an emerging national debate about the health of our seas. Observers say she’s succeeding where so many scientists and activists have failed: taking what is often seen from the public’s perspective as an environmental problem and reframing it as a people problem. In Roberson’s rendering, ocean acidification isn’t about climate change, or ocean health, or even about those bivalves in the seabed. Instead, it’s about farmers, jobs and […]
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Every night, Donna Young goes to bed with her pistol, a .45 Taurus Judge with laser attachment. Last fall, she says, someone stole onto her ranch to poison her livestock, or tried to; happily, her son found the d-CON wrapper and dumped all the feed from the troughs. Strangers phoned the house to wish her dead or run out of town on a rail. Local nurses and doctors went them one better, she says, warning pregnant women that Young’s incompetence had killed babies and would surely kill theirs too, if given the chance.
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Ecouterre interviews Linda Greer, Director of the Natural Resources Defense Council Linda Greer ranks among the fashion industry’s leading “toxic avengers.” As director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s five-year-old “Clean by Design” initiative, Greer is on the front line of a sector burdened by high energy and water use and endemic, often catastrophic, pollution. Her Sisyphean task? To leverage the purchasing power of multinational brands and retailers to chip away at the environmental impacts of their manufacturing abroad, beginning with the biggest offender: China. As NRDC prepares to, in its own words, “aggressively expand” the program’s reach, Ecouterre caught up with Greer to learn about her “win-win” strategy, what the early days of Clean by Design were like, and how we can differentiate the “true-gooders” from the “green-washers” in a post–corporate-social-responsibility world. E: How did Clean by Design get its start? LG: In 2008, the president of NRDC asked me to develop a project that would help to reduce the heavy industrial air and water pollution in China and serve as a model the country could use to accelerate its efforts. To do so, I first selected an industry with a heavy environmental footprint. Textiles distinguished itself as one […]
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The Geography Of Hope Conference is an exceptional biennial literary festival, held every other year in the northern California coastal village of Point Reyes Station, California, is a gathering featuring writers, artists and activists who use their craft to convey the urgency of environmental issues facing the world today. This year’s theme is titled “Women And The Land.”
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As a new mother, I am always researching various topics regarding child rearing and environmentally friendly practices. Here are a few sites that I frequent or find inspirational.
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Robert Redford — playing The Redwood in our Nature Is Speaking film — sums up the incredible life history of redwood trees, which are older and bigger than most living things on Earth.
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