EcocentricTechnology
Sure, Japanese vending machines got a bad wrap awhile back for selling schoolgirls’ underwear, but that was then. If you’ve been to Tokyo recently, you know and love the machines’ for their convenience and ingenuity. For example, unlike their un-evolved counterparts in most of the world, Japanese vending machines have a couple of …
EcocentricWildlife
Not so long ago, I was sitting at King’s Harbor in Redondo Beach, which is about a ten minute drive from where I grew up in LA. I was drinking a glass of wine at a restaurant on the marina, watching people on their liveaboard boats at sunset, and thinking how great it must be one of them, perpetually barefoot, with a dog that has …
EcocentricWildlife
An irresistible press release popped up in my inbox this morning. Last month, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist spotted this Laysan albatross on the world’s most remote coral atoll, smack in the middle of the Pacific near Hawaii. The bird was first tagged by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in 1956, when she was estimated …
EcocentricRegulation
As the National People’s Congress kicks off in Beijing, Chinese leaders’ priorities for the nation were rolled out over the weekend in the 11th five-year plan (2011-2015). Among those priorities, which include pledges to improve pollution, increase clean energy production and reduce the nation’s yawning wealth gap, is tackling …
EcocentricEnergy
Last week environmental activists in Brazil – and Hollywood – were celebrating a victory over what is slated to become the world’s third largest hydroelectric plant. A Brazilian court in Para state ruled last Friday that the state-backed project, key to President’s Dilma Rousseff’s infrastructure push to support Brazil’s …
EcocentricEcocentric
China’s Environment Minster has published an essay on the web site of his young agency warning that if the nation doesn’t do more to mitigate the environmental consequences of the nation’s economic expansion, things won’t be expanding for long.
Zhou Shengxian writes:
“In China’s thousands of years of civilization, the conflict
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EcocentricWeather
We often use this little corner of the intertubes to think about how globalization is physically changing the earth – be it via our addiction to air travel or jeans made on the cheap. But we’re not sticklers. Recent research published in the journal Science presents archaeological evidence that might shed new light on exactly the …
EcocentricWildlife
If you’re a shark, the Pacific Islands are not a bad place to be these days. Yesterday, the Senate of Guam followed Hawaii’s lead and became the third region to move to ban the sale, possession and distribution of shark products in the U.S. territory. Hawaii was the first U.S. state to make the move last year, followed by the …
EcocentricRegulation
Ugh. Hong Kong’s English daily South China Morning Post has a distinctly unsavory dispatch from the Chinese media this morning: Government scientists have released research that millions of acres of Chinese agricultural land and over 12 million tons of Chinese grain are contaminated by toxic metal pollution, according to this …
EcocentricWildlife
As authorities scrambled to pick up the pieces after a deadly earthquake hit the southern New Zealand town of Christchurch on Tuesday, government workers further south had just finished handling an altogether different kind of natural disaster. Over the weekend, more than 100 pilot whales were found on a remote beach on Stewart Island …
