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The Science and Hysteria of California’s Shade Balls
Did you catch that news story a few weeks ago about how Los Angeles is combatting its historic drought with 96 million black plastic balls? The idea is prevent excess water evaporation in the city’s...
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Environmental Migration and the Difference between Florida Retirees and...
The culprit in Ethiopia is the encroaching Danakil Desert. In Bangladesh it’s the unforgiving Brahmaputra and Padma rivers. In Tuvalu it’s the rising Pacific Ocean. Water—too much or too little—is...
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The Problem with the LED Revolution
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: For the sake of our collective wallets and the fate of the planet, we need to replace all our light bulbs. Many of us who dutifully switched to CFLs back in the...
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The Strange Saga of the Khian Sea
I was all set to write about Agbogbloshie, the neighborhood in Accra, Ghana, that is the world’s epicenter of toxic e-waste. But in researching the topic, I stumbled upon the tangentially related story...
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Can We Really Suck Carbon out of the Air?
An experimental facility just opened near Vancouver, British Columbia, that uses giant fans to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and then store it in little pellets of calcium carbonate that...
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Are Your Recyclables Really Being Recycled?
As a sentient, media-consuming citizen of Planet Earth, I am a natural cynic. You can hardly blame me for thinking, while watching the recycling truck trundle down the road, “I bet those recyclables...
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Kelp: It’s What’s for Dinner
Kelp is the miracle food of the future. It will solve so many problems, you don’t even know. For starters, it grows in the ocean, which is awesome, because there’s lots of room there. Plus, it can...
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Citizen Science for the Holidays: Join the Christmas Bird Count
Source: http://vt.audubon.org/audubon-christmas-bird-count-0 Get some fresh air this holiday season by helping out the Audubon Society. You’ll get to do science, gain valuable nature karma, and bask in...
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Environmental Disasters You’ve Never Heard Of: The Kirtland Air Force Base...
Pop quiz: What’s the largest land-based oil spill in U.S. history? Answer: The Kirtland Air Force Base jet fuel leak. Pull up a chair and let me tell you a story about governmental negligence, willful...
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Back to the Future: Solar Genius Frank Shuman
Every age has its Leonardo, Benjamin Franklin, Nikola Tesla, or Elon Musk. Every age also has inventors lost to history, who were either ahead of their time or simply overshadowed by those with a gift...
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50 Simple Things We Did that Saved the Earth
Remember that late 1980s gem of a bestseller, 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth? I was feeling nostalgic the other day, so I cracked open the slightly yellowed pages of my copy and fell...
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Road Salt + Hubris = Flint’s Tainted Drinking Water
Thousands of people in Flint, Michigan, have been drinking water polluted with lead for the past couple of years. This whole nightmare scenario could have been prevented if people had simply done their...
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Pesticides Have the Bees by Their Knees
Scientists have now shown that imidacloprid, a popular pesticide from a class called neonicotinoids (or neonics for short), kills honey bees and is likely at least partially responsible for colony...
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A Tale of Two Trees: The Birth of Conservation
This is the story about two trees. One was named Mammoth Tree, the other Mother of the Forest. The year was 1853 and the place was Calaveras County, California—the same one celebrated in Mark Twain’s...
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The Broken Promises of Masdar: The World’s First Zero-Carbon City
Picture this: A bucolic modern city in the inhospitable desert of Abu Dhabi, a futuristic urban landscape of cutting-edge green technology that serves as an incubator for the people and ideas that will...
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The Great Emu War of 1932
Australia has so many things the rest of the world doesn’t. The emu is one of them. About 725,000 of these brown, flightless birds roam the Outback. The only larger bird in the world is the ostrich of...
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Environmental Ghost Towns
A recent headline out of Flint, Michigan, stated that only 7 percent of the city’s homes had lead in their water above federal safety levels. While that is certainly a tragedy and requires a thorough...
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U.S. warns Mosul Dam at risk of collapse.
The Tigris River is the cradle of civilization, the liquid heart of ancient Mesopotamia, which hasn’t been the same since the Babylonians sacked Nineveh in 612 BCE. The river also has the bad fortune...
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