Blogs

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Apples of Our Eyes, Nose, and Mouths

When the leaves of New England begin to glow with crimsons, purples and golds, many of us remember that it's time for crimson, purple and gold apples to be picked, packed, sequestered in storage sheds, or processed into cider, butter, sauces or pies. Apples exemplify that taste of the fall for many of us, but just what kind of apples we taste depends upon just where exactly we live, and how well we know our neighboring orchard-keepers.
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How Would You Spend It?

Congress passed the bailout plan with a price tag of nearly a trillion dollars, but the ink was hardly dry on this new Monopoly money when quite a few experts began to predict it wouldn't be enough. Some estimates hope the "investments" that taxpayers will make in bad debts could ultimately turn a profit, but how likely is that?
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Green Products and ROI

Financing isn't the first thing that comes to mind when you here the term green building. Instead it's usually solar panels, bamboo flooring, or a piece of plumbing equipment you're not sure you really want to understand. But just like other building materials, green products cost money. What makes them different is that green products typically provide a greater return on investment than conventional products.
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New Lessons from Old Europe

Scientists tend to distrust conclusions that are not based on empirical data and adequate sample sizes. So take what I'm about to say with a large grain of salt, since it is neither empirical nor based on sufficient data.
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Bail-out or Build-out?

As Washington and Wall Street dicker over a financial rescue plan, everyone is missing the real opportunity to fix the problem. Some see the variously proposed plans as bailouts of dumb borrowers and dumber lenders, while others view it as a chance to restore liquidity to the marketplace so we can all have access to credit again, whether it's for student loans or to finance the acquisition of industrial machinery.
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Building the Green Community Around the Green Building

So, you're approaching green as part of your mission, you're using the integrated design process, and you've tweaked the financing structure to cover the added costs. Voila! A solid green project, right? No quite. There's one more, often ignored, element needed to guarantee the long-term success of a green affordable housing project.
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Potato Diversity and Traditional Knowledge

As mentioned in last week's blog post, in Peru's Parque de la Papa-the Potato Park-, the Quechuan farmers maintain some 1200 varieties of potatoes named in their own language. Farmers are particularly attentive to the effects of climate change on the micro-habitats where each potato variety can be planted. Quechuan Ricardo Paco Chipa says his father constantly reminds him that the elevation distributions of potatoes today are far different than those that were common when he first farmed a half century ago.
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Migrating Birds of Falsterbo

In late September, there are few places in North America where I would rather be than Cape May, New Jersey, arguably the best place on the continent to watch migrating birds in the autumn. But I'm in Europe now, not North America, and this past weekend I had the pleasure of visiting the Cape May of Scandinavia, a place called Falsterbo. Located in southwestern Sweden, Falsterbo is a thin peninsula that juts into the ocean.

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