40 years ago, a small crew of filmmakers set out to document some of the more pressing issues involving wildlife in America. They made eight half-hour films around the country and in doing so made what is believed to be the first environmental TV series in the US. Entitled
Our Vanishing Wilderness,
all eight episodes are now online and free to view here.
posted by Effigy2000
on Mar 18, 2010 -
4 comments
Rising up from deep within the aquifer, cool clear water flows from hundreds of springs that dot the Florida landscape.
Florida springs are natural wonders that are threatened constantly.
[more inside]
posted by netbros
on Dec 24, 2009 -
14 comments
The public's
opinion of the field of climatology has been shaken by the
leaked CRU emails. While it's
arguable that the messages show any
wrongdoing,
many pundits have now reached the conclusion that global warming is a hoax, coverup and conspiracy, years in the making with millions of faked datapoints. Sarah Palin has written an
editorial saying Obama should boycott the Copenhagen
COP15 summit.
posted by mccarty.tim
on Dec 9, 2009 -
270 comments
In 2010,
Obama will have a miserable year,
NATO may lose in Afghanistan,
the UK gets a regime change,
China needs to chill,
India's factories will overtake its farms,
Europe risks becoming an irrelevant museum,
the stimulus will need an exit strategy,
the G20 will see a challenge from the "G2",
African football will
unite Korea,
conflict over natural resources will grow,
Sarkozy will be unloved and unrivalled,
the kids will come together to solve the world's problems (because their elders are unable),
technology will grow ever more ubiquitous,
we'll all charge our phones via USB,
MBAs will be uncool,
the Space Shuttle will be put to rest, and
Somalia will be the worst country in the world. And so
the Tens begin.
The Economist: The World in 2010.
[more inside]
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane
on Nov 14, 2009 -
60 comments
The Polar Discovery team has documented science in action from pole to pole during the historic 2007-2009 International Polar Year, and
covered five scientific expeditions. The science projects explored a range of topics from climate change and glaciers, to Earth’s geology, biology, ocean chemistry, circulation, and technology at the icy ends of the earth. Through
photo essays and
other multimedia, they explain how scientists collected data and what they discovered about the rapidly changing polar regions. From the awesome folks at
WHOI.
posted by netbros
on Nov 9, 2009 -
4 comments
For hundreds of years, mariners have dreamed of an Arctic shortcut that would allow them to speed trade between Asia and the West. Two German ships are poised to complete that transit for the first time, aided by the retreat of Arctic ice that scientists have linked to global warming.
Arctic Shortcut Beckons Shippers as Ice Thaws.
posted by flapjax at midnite
on Sep 11, 2009 -
24 comments
Most people have heard about how rising CO2 levels are resulting in a
changing global climate. Fewer have heard about the other consequence of rising CO2 levels- when the CO2 is absorbed into the oceans, it disassociates into carbonic acid. This alters the pH of our world's oceans, and it's called "
Ocean Acidification". This changing ocean chemistry has many important and devastating consequences.
[more inside]
posted by WhySharksMatter
on Sep 5, 2009 -
21 comments
How green was my valley: California's economic meltdown The fields of wheat, cotton and cantaloupe that sustained his family for three generations are gone. The land is a mess of fallow fields, cracked earth and swirling dust. (PDF - By some estimates, 12.8% of the United States' agricultural production (as measured by dollar value) comes from California, and the majority of that is in the Central Valley).
However, his particular scene of devastation, Mr. Allen argues, has nothing to do with the credit crisis, the housing crash or the downturn that has California in a vice grip.
It has to do with a seven-centimetre-long, semi-translucent, steel blue fish known as the Delta smelt. [more inside]
posted by KokuRyu
on Jul 24, 2009 -
76 comments
Recently,
John Michael Greer has been exploring a little known idea of the deceased economist
E.F. Schumacher (a student of the oft-discussed
Keynes).
"Schumacher drew a hard distinction between primary goods and secondary goods. The latter of these includes everything dealt with by conventional economics: the goods and services produced by human labor and exchanged among human beings. The former includes all those things necessary for human life and economic activity that are produced not by human beings, but by nature. Schumacher pointed out that primary goods, as the phrase implies, need to come first in any economic analysis because they supply the preconditions for the production of secondary goods. Renewable resources, he proposed, form the equivalent of income in the primary economy, while nonrenewable resources are the equivalent of capital; to insist that an economic system is sound when it is burning through nonrenewable resources at a rate that will lead to rapid depletion is thus as silly as claiming that a business is breaking even if it’s covering up huge losses by drawing down its bank accounts." [more inside]
posted by symbollocks
on Jul 10, 2009 -
14 comments
Imagine nature's most elegant ideas organized by design and engineering function, so you can enter "filter salt from water" and see how mangroves, penguins, and shorebirds desalinate without fossil fuels. That's the idea behind
AskNature, the online inspiration source for the
biomimicry community. The
featured pages are a good starting point. Cross-pollinating biology with design.
[more inside]
posted by netbros
on Jun 5, 2009 -
13 comments
