A practice that started in the late 1800s is experiencing a sustainable resurgence as communities begin to construct super efficient houses out of bales of straw. In this article Emily Sullivan explains how using straw bales to build houses not only greatly reduces our footprint on the Earth, but also improves communities through job creation and economic improvement.
UK greenhouse gas emissions are probably twice as bad as figures suggest, says the government’s chief energy scientist.
A TV advert paid for by an oil industry lobbyist telling Americans “more CO2 results in a greener earth” would be almost funny if it weren’t so depressing.
High population growth is not sustainable – but neither is low fertility, says Reiner Klingholz
There is a definite cause-effect relationship between the environment and human health, one of direct dependency. To put it in simple terms, the healthier the Earth is, the healthier its inhabitants. It’s something that is pretty obvious if only we stop to think about it, but since most of us are busy with our own lives, we fail to see how the two are interlinked.
Earthzine invites undergraduate and graduate students from around the world to submit an essay for the 2009 Student Essay Competition: Sustainability through Earth Observation and Engineering. Students should submit essays that follow one of the two dominant themes in sustainability: social equity and environmental protection. Essays should also be related to one or more of Earthzine’s focal topics: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Climate, Disasters, Ecosystems, Energy, Health, Water, or Weather.
The winners of the Volvo Adventure, the world wide search undertaken with United Nations Environmental Programme to find the most innovative, imaginative and practical projects devised by young people to solve environmental problems, have been announced. A team from the Yucatan coast of Mexico took first place for their ingenious project involving sustainable aquaculture ponds, while second and third place went to schools in England and India respectively.
When farms start spending too long above 29 °C, yields will nosedive, says a new study
As the world’s population grows, competition for food, water and energy will increase. Food prices will rise, more people will go hungry, and migrants will flee the worst-affected regions.
Coyote Mentoring: One School’s Lessons in Nature Awareness gives a snapshot of the direction that Earth observation should be taking in the classroom, says Associate Editor for Education David Mullins, Ph.D. “It’s especially pertinent to teaching the present generation. Educators are beginning to recognize that kids are less and less impressed with computers; they aren’t new and exciting to them. In their digitally ubiquitous worlds (e.g., email, discussion boards, chat rooms, blogs, Twitter, FaceBook, IM, text messaging, and Flickr) kids quickly discover that getting your hands dirty during a fossil hunt and your feet wet doing water quality testing is both fun and educational. So, I think this article is in line with the evolving STEM literature implicating the gender and cultural foundations of science education and the need for measurement and observation in the physical environment for future scientists to truly appreciate the data they see on computer monitors.”
