On his blog “I see a change,” Nigerian Youth Development Expert Olumide Idowu presents the elements of sustainable development (source: olumideidowu.blog.com). Not all online courses provide all they promise you, but here’s one that should answer all your questions about environmentally sustainable, socially inclusive economic development. It will also challenge you to find out more.
A new study has shown that selective logging of tropical forests may be one of the few feasible options for conservation in the face of the huge financial incentives pushing developing nations and tropical landholders to convert forests into cash. The study analysed data from more than a hundred studies of tropical forests that
The Occupy Revolution is clearly a force to be reckoned with in our culture. Even at this early stage, the battle lines are being drawn. Many cities are resisting this new people-powered movement, as it feels threatening to status quo politicians and the 1%, so influential in the current political climate. This in spite of
The Yucca brevifolia, better known as the Joshua tree, is looking at an uncertain future as the world continues to warm. New research by a U.S. Geological Survey ecologist shows that the Joshua tree will likely be eliminated from 90 percent of their current range within the next 60 to 90 years.
In 2006, Arctic hunters shot and killed a strange-looking, white bear. It was strange because the bear had large patches of brown fur in its coat. Subsequent genetic analysis showed that it was in fact a cross between a polar bear and a grizzly bear (making it a “grolar” or “pizzly” bear). Apparently, more grizzlies
Yasuni National Park, located 250 km inland along the Eastern most border of Ecuador, is a world record holder in biodiversity richness: The roughly 10,000 km² forest is home to 139 species of amphibians (besting Columbia’s Leticia Park with its 98 species) and an estimated 100,000 species of insects. This latter figure represents the highest
New research conducted at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem show that many tree species may be unable to shift with the changing climates, and could face extinction if manmade intervention is not made. The research looked at trees which dispersed their seeds via the wind, which include trees like pines and maples, and looked at
According to a new study the amount of dust in the planet’s atmosphere has doubled over the last century, and unsurprisingly is affecting climate and ecology around the world. Led by Natale Mahowald, an associate professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Cornell University, the study set out to use available data combined with computer
Two ecologist discover that by adapting Google’s Page Rank algorithm they were able to “reverse engineer” the collapse of food webs, and thus determining which species in a given web are most critical to the web’s existence.
In this talk, Jackson continuously returns to the three major factors that are dramatically altering our oceans: over-fishing, pollution, and climate change. These factors, he notes, do not arise and operate in isolation, but rather, they feedback into each other and “synergize” to make for a major, impending, ecological disaster.
Since its inception in 2000, some 2500 companies from 60 countries have joined in on the Carbon Disclosure Project and begun reporting their estimated carbon emissions and other climate change related policies. This also provides a strong public relations incentive for said companies to set reduction targets and implement improvements such as stronger energy efficiency standards.
Communities of all sorts are being disturbed by the fires in California. As another result of climate change, bird communities are expected to see some big changes in other ways, according to a new report released on September 1.
[social_buttons] I remember the good old days, playing backyard baseball. Every now and then the perfect pitch would come, and, no matter how terribly I’d been hitting up to that point, I’d knock that ball out of the park. And the crowd would go wild…until everyone saw where that ball was headed. And with a
Cold-blooded animals have a lifespan which is exponentially related to the temperature of their environment, a new study finds. That means that as temperatures increase due to global warming, cold-blooded animals around the world will begin dying younger. Given that the vast majority of animals on Earth are cold-blooded, including the likes of amphibians, mollusks,
A new road is needed in the Kenyan Osupuku Conservancy. And strong stone is needed for the road. A Chinese corporation, Sinohydro, owns a rock quarry, which offers the best stones to build a strong road; a road which wouldn’t need repairs for a long time. However, the rock quarry poses a threat to the aboriginal wildlife of the region.
[social_buttons] Britain’s largest water company has been fined £125,000 ($180,000), after polluting London’s River Wandle to such an extent that it wiped out twenty years of painstaking conservation work in a single day. The shocking incident occurred in 2007, when Chlorine escaped from a Thames Water sewage treatment works, killing most of the fish along
[social_buttons] A huge increase in China’s demand for rubber is leading to the destruction of vast swathes of the country’s precious old-growth forests, and could cause irreversible environmental damage. The shocking findings have been revealed in a new study by scientists at the Chinese Academy of Science’s flagship conservation institute, the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden
The Puget Soundkeeper Alliance has been suing companies under the 1972 Clean Water Act when they do not meet these minimal federal regulations. The law empowers citizens to bring lawsuits against individual polluters, and the Soundkeeper Alliance has been aggressively focusing on the biggest culprits with big results. While defendants argue that companies are negligible
There’s something that’s been made increasingly apparent to me living in an ecovillage for the past year: environmental sustainability requires a change in culture. Society cannot achieve this sustainability through simplified living alone. Growing organic food, using renewable energy, and decreasing one’s ecological footprint are all positive things, no doubt, but true, holistic sustainability comes
In Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace, Indian physicist turned environmental activist Vandana Shiva calls for a radical shift in the values that govern democracies, decrying the role that unrestricted capitalism has played in the destruction of environments and livelihoods. By no means a new release, Shiva’s book is incredibly timely as skyrocketing fuel costs
Few places on Earth are as untouched as the "Crown of the Continent" — a 10-million-acre expanse of mountains, valleys and prairies in Montana and Canada. The area has sustained all the same species — including grizzlies, lynx, moose and bull trout — for at least 200 years.
Now — in one of the most significant conservation sales in history — The Nature Conservancy and The Trust for Public Land have preserved 320,000 acres of forestlands in western Montana that provide valuable habitat for species in the Crown of the Continent.
Cities and their even larger, fast-growing siblings — megacities (more than 10 million people) and hypercities (more than 20 million people) — aren’t just products of human civilization that dramatically affect their surrounding ecosystems. They’ve emerged as unique ecosystems in their own rights. In “Global Change and the Ecology of Cities,” published in the Feb.
