Development and climate change are creating the perfect conditions for widely destructive infernos.
(Source: thisiscitylab)
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May 9, 2014
U.S. Forest Fires Are Likely to Get Yet More Frequent and Nightmarish
May 5, 2014
How Oysters Can Protect Houses From Hurricanes
Sea walls have been around for centuries. They protect prized coastal property—San Francisco’s Embarcadero, Taylor Swift’s Rhode Island mansion, and the Indian shores of Pondicherry, to name a few—by deflecting incoming waves and storm surges.
The town of Bay Head, New Jersey, credits a hidden, hundred-year-old sea wall with saving scores of houses from destruction during Hurricane Sandy. In a place where homes could have been reduced to rubble, only “minor structural effects” were observed, scientists say: “Despite the immense magnitude and duration of the storm, a relatively small coastal obstacle—the seawall—reduced potential wave loads by a factor of two.”
More and more cities are expected to suffer from extreme weather in the years ahead—and more frequently. Worldwide sea levels are expected to rise, too, putting coastal communities at great risk. Accordingly, the global market for sea walls is projected to be worth $9 billion by 2023.
Read more. [Image: Noah Berger/Reuters]
April 30, 2014
The Woman Who Breaks Mega-Dams
Ruth Buendía Mestoquiari has built her career, and staked the fate of her people, on the law.
But she doesn’t have a law degree. In fact, she didn’t even start elementary school until she was a teenager and didn’t finish high school until age 25. While her peers went to class, she spent her childhood in the 1980s and 90s shuttling between her native village of Cutivireni, the town of Satipo, and the city of Lima, as Peru’s two-decade civil war devastated her community and claimed her father, who was killed in the violence when Buendía was only 12.
What Buendía does have is five children, all 18 and younger, and a “wonderful husband.” She has the distinction of being the first female president of CARE, an organization representing roughly 10,000 indigenous Asháninka who live along the banks of the Ene River in the Peruvian Amazon. And she has a knack for blocking massive hydroelectric dams, having thwarted not one but two planned projects that she believed would displace the Asháninka and destroy the ancestral lands they depend on for their livelihoods. It’s a threat she characterizes as “economic terrorism,” in an allusion to the armed terrorism she experienced during the civil war.
Through it all, she’s managed to redeem what we’ve come to consider something of a dark art: the lawsuit.
Read more. [Image: Goldman Environmental Prize]
April 25, 2014
A Blueprint for Protecting the World’s Oceans
There is really only one ocean. But over time, it’s been cordoned off into various regions, with the most fluid of boundaries. Today, geographers recognize more than 50 seaswithin five major oceans. There are also more than 150 Exclusive Economic Zones where individual coastal nations exercise sovereignty up to 200 nautical miles from their shores.
Now, thanks to the rise of marine protected areas (MPAs), the global ocean is becoming increasingly partitioned. The term is a catchall for sites like ocean sanctuaries, marine parks, and no-fishing zones—scattered havens where marine life is supposed to thrive, free of human interference (or, at least, subject to limited human interference). The world’s 5,000-plus MPAs include national treasures like the Galápagos and the Great Barrier Reef, but they also include small “fishery-management zones” that are undistinguished except for fine-print prohibitions on certain types of fishing gear. Even the Great Barrier Reef is open to extractive activities like trawl fishing and deep-sea dredging.
Only 2 percent of the ocean is currently covered by some sort of MPA. (In contrast, 12 percent of the world’s land is protected in national-park systems and wildlife preserves.) And only half of that 2 percent—a mere 1 percent of the ocean—is classified as “no-take,” or completely closed to fishing and other extractive activity.
The international conservation community has long heralded the role of MPAs in protecting ocean resources.
Read more. [Image: MPAtlas.org ]
March 14, 2014
A Caretaker and a Killer: How Hunters Can Save the Wilderness
Stereotypes of gun-toting brutes and tree-hugging hippies miss the basic facts about who is protecting nature—and why.Read more. [Image: kkirugi/Flickr]
March 6, 2014
How the Famous Marshmallow Study Explains Environmental Conservation
In the Stanford marshmallow experiment, arguably the most famous study ever conducted on the concept of delayed gratification, children were offered a choice between receiving one small treat (like a marshmallow) immediately or receiving two treats later (like, 15 minutes later). In the years since, the ability to choose deferred rewards over smaller immediate rewards has been associated with numerous positives such as enhanced self-esteem, academic excellence, and physical fitness.
Marine biologist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson speculates that this trait may also have something to do with being better at environmental stewardship.
Johnson thinks a lot about how humans interact with ocean resources (like fish), and what drives us to exploit or conserve these resources. One question she returns to, over and over, is: How can we enable people to take a long-term view when it comes to the wealth of the oceans—"to save some for later, to use the ocean without using it up?“
The answer to that question has more to do with people and the psychology of human decision-making than it does with fish and ecology. So, while doing field work in Curacao and Bonaire for her marine biology Ph.D., Johnson ended up designing a behavioral economics study.
Read more. [Image: Ayana Johnson]
January 28, 2014
Crush and Burn: A History of the Global Crackdown on Ivory
It’s an unlikely and ambitious government project: Over the next two years, Hong Kong will embark on the world’s largest ivory burn, setting 28 tons of illegally harvested tusks aflame to signal a shift in its valuation of elephants. As National Geographic reports, this is actually the latest in a string of public ivory disposals around the world. China crushed six tons of tusks and ivory ornaments on January 6; the United States smashed six tons in November 2013; and the Philippines burned five tons in June 2013, making history as the first “ivory-consuming nation” to destroy almost all of its national stock. Gabon burned its stockpile in June 2012.
All this comes after elephant poaching and ivory smuggling reached unprecedented levelsin 2011, a year in which at least 25,000 African elephants were killed for their tusks, according to a statistician involved in monitoring illegal elephant killings. By early 2013, terms like “blood ivory” and “African Elephant Crisis” were on the lips of conservationists and politicians alike.
That’s about when the U.S. embarked on a period of frenzied activity to combat the ivory trade.
Read more. [Image: James Morgan/World Wildlife Foundation/Associated Press]
December 13, 2013
The Greenest Things to Do With Your Body After You Die
Every year cemeteries across the U.S. bury over 100,000 tons of steel and 1,500,000 tons of concrete from coffins and re-enforced vaults. Green burrials are all about reconnecting death and nature, reducing exorbitant costs, and sparking an environmental paradigm shift.Read more. [Image: USFWS Pacific/flickr]
November 1, 2013
The 4,000 inmates at Santa Rita Jail in the San Francisco Bay Area have an unusual home. The Alameda County facility boasts a microgrid, a self-contained power system consisting of a 1.2-megawatt rooftop solar array, five wind turbines generating 11.2 kilowatts, a one-megawatt fuel cell, and two megawatts worth of batteries to store all that energy.
That makes Santa Rita perhaps the world’s greenest modern jail, according to a discussion at a recent conference. It, and other large-scale infrastructure projects like it, are another sign that institutions are beginning to pull the plug on a century-old energy business model in which a monopoly utility sells electricity at a regulated rate for a regulated profit to captive customers. “We’re saving a $100,000 a year while generating our own renewable energy,” Matt Muniz, Alameda County’s energy program manager, said of the facility at a recent conference in San Francisco.
Read more. [Image: Google]
October 16, 2013
Nuns With a New Creed: Environmentalism
Every woman in this story is confoundingly non-descript. Short hair, often grey. Conservative dress. Unmarried; soft-spoken. Most are well into their seventies, and all will tell you that their way of life is dying out. They will also tell you, with surprising conviction, that the world is in peril.
They are Roman Catholic sisters, from a variety of orders—Dominican, Mercy, Passionist—but don’t think Whoopie Goldberg or a young Sally Field. While many of their aged peers are living out their days in quiet convents, these women are digging gardens and offsetting carbon. They’re as well-versed in solar and geothermal technology as they are in the Gospels of Luke and John, and some wear Carhartts and work boots like they’re habits. At the heart of the women’s action is a belief that the changing climate and world demand a new kind of vocation – that Ave Marias won’t cut it anymore, but maybe clean energy will. Called Green Sisters, or Sisters of Earth, they are pushing the bounds of their tradition toward a new, and deeply spiritual, kind of environmentalism.
Read more. [Image: Angela Evancie]
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