Tens of thousands of modern-day crusaders, charlatans, Nobel laureates, CEOs, quick-buck artists, earnest politicians, and assorted movie extras of every conceivable socio-political-ethnic-economic background will descend on Copenhagen for the next three...
Island Press Field Notes
Many families who dutifully recycle, take mass transit, and have a house full of compact fluorescent light bulbs, would say they're doing their part to save the earth. However, a new study from the London School of Economics suggests that in developed...
Although the summer's first tropical storm to make U.S. landfall, Claudette, avoided doing significant damage, we're now in the midst of hurricane season.
Today we watched the assembly and installation of the thirty-foot blades of a 100 KW wind turbine on the 10 acre campus of the Woods Hole Research Center on the southern coast of Cape Cod.
At a recent three-day workshop here in Vermont, I joined a visionary set of leaders, including Mary Evelyn Tucker,...
Today, hundreds of citizens are on the forefront of the climate movement; 20 years ago, in the summer of 1989, the fight against global warming had only two well-known spokespeople: Senator Al Gore and NASA Scientist Jim Hansen. (Bill McKibben, now at...
People sometimes ask me what they will learn by reading Heatstroke. Basically there are two key messages. One I've already highlighted in past blogs and in a recent...
The western United States is characterized by highly variable and seasonal rainfall patterns. To deal with the constant threat of drought, the West relies on intensively managed water systems. Today, those systems face two challenges that were not...
What comes to mind when you hear the words "natural resources?" Oil. Water. Nature. Nature? In fact, yes, nature is one of the big ones. Ecologists and economists have a name for the natural resources that nature provides: "ecosystem services."...
The 15th Conference of the Parties (COP15) sounds like a contradiction in terms--conferences are business-like and dull while parties are, well, fun! But COP 15 is actually the formal name of the annual gathering of nations that participate in the UN's...