Interest in Deck Parks Growing

Posted: September 7, 2010
Highways are unsightly. Recently, there has been a resurrgence in building parks over a city highways. According to Peter Harnik, director of the Center for City Park Excellence at the Trust for Public Land and author of Urban Green: Innovative Parks for Resurgent Cities, despite the bad economy, interest in deck parks has only grown stronger.

Read more on the deck park trend

The Scientist and the Journalist Can Be Friends

Posted: September 7, 2010
Reporter Tom Jacobs of Miller-McCune calls Nancy Baron's Escape from the Ivory Tower, an excellent guide for academic researchers on how to effectively communicate with the press, public and policymakers.

Living in a Landscape of Fear: How Predators Impact an Ecosystem

Posted: August 18, 2010
An excerpt of Cristina Eisenberg's The Wolf's Tooth is featured in Scientific American discussing how wolves, and other top predators, literally reshape the landscapes they inhabit by changing the behavior of their prey.

Glennon's Unquenchable Takes Second Place in Environmental Book Award

Posted: August 10, 2010
Robert Glennon's Unquenchable: America's Water Crisis and What To Do About It won second place in the Society of Environmental Journalists' 2010 Rachel Carson Environment Book Award.

Here's what the judges said:
Though there have been other books before it which have put America's water crisis into some sort of regional perspective, Unquenchable impressed judges with its depth of reporting, its comprehensive scope, its authoritative voice and its almost up-to-the-minute research. Glennon surely writes better than your typical law professor; as one judge stated, he provided "a masterful survey of our nation's tangled water policies, as well as our wrong-headed assumptions that we can develop in the desert despite ever-scarcer supplies of water."

Oliver Houck: "We Have Improved Eden"

Posted: August 5, 2010
"No state in the union has been more firmly wedded to the oil and gas industry than Louisiana," Houck wrote in an article for The Nation, "Who Will Pay to Fix Louisiana?"

As Louisiana looks at its future, Houck states, "...the sad fact is that the ongoing destruction of the Louisiana coastal zone—by canal, by pipeline, by boat wakes, by the extraction of billions of gallons of subsurface oil, gas and brines—has done far more indelible damage, not only to the landscape but to a way of life that could be sustainable for generations beyond the future of oil down here."

In Taking Back Eden: Eight Environmental Cases that Changed the World, Houck describes eight environmental cases under contention in their place and time, the people who rose up, their lawyers, strategies, obstacles, setbacks and victories.

Ending Oil Dependency with Green Chemistry

Posted: August 5, 2010
Author Elizabeth Grossman writes on Huffinton Post, "Can Green Chemistry Get Us Out of Deepwater?" where she challenges society's dependence on petrochemicals for manufactured goods and products.

In Grossman's book Chasing Molecules, she looks inside industrial technologies of many large, brand-name companies. "There are already some other packaging materials that perform comparably to PVC, but many companies have also begun to shift away from PVC as a structural material."

Many products have already been made through green chemistry. Case in point, Live Science published an article recently how Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute undergrads turned mushrooms in to green packaging. Read more on green chemistry

Harnik Talks Parks on WNYC Radio

Posted: July 27, 2010
Peter Harnik, author of Urban Green: Innovative Parks for Resurgent Cities, speaks with WNYC's The Brian Lehrer Show about park policies, the modern urban park, and how cities are adding innnovative parkland.

World Loses Renowned Climate Scientist

Posted: July 19, 2010
Today, with the passing of Dr. Stephen Schneider, author of Climate Change Science & Policy and Wildlife Responses to Climate Change, Island Press mourns the loss of a dear friend, colleague, and author. "This is a loss for not just for the climate community, but for all of us. Steve was as smart and unflinching a spokesperson on climate as we have seen. But just as importantly, he thought deeply about how to bring science into the debate around the most difficult challenges we face. He helped carve out a new role for science and for scientists. We can only hope that his example is widely emulated," said Todd Baldwin, Island Press Vice-President and Associate Publisher.

Does America Face a Water Crisis?

Robert Glennon, author of Unquenchable, reveals that we're using water that took thousands of years to accumulate in a few decades, and offers water conservation suggestions.