EcocentricWildlife
It can be hard to feel much sympathy for bats. Like snakes or spiders or sharks or bunnies (OK, maybe the last one is just me), there’s something primordially alarming about bats, something that activates the lizard part of the brain and shutters empathy. Bats aren’t actually “flying rodents,” but you likely won’t see them on the …
EcocentricUncategorized
I’ve got one more tidbit from last weekend’s meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and it’s nothing less than a new scientific concept: telecoupling.
This is not, as you might expect, a particular risqué form of conference call. Telecoupling refers to how connections between nature and human …
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 …
EcocentricPolitics
I have a Going Green column on the Time.com mainpage about the similarities between the federal debt every politician in Washington claims to be worried about, and the debt to nature that almost no one is talking about. They’re remarkable similar. As a country, we’ve run up a massive federal debt in part because we’ve lived beyond our …
EcocentricUncategorized
Of all the projected impacts of climate change, the scariest one in a world is the effect warming could have on our ability to feed ourselves. Scientists have looked at the impact of major heat waves in the past, and have found that such abnormally hot weather tends to hurt agriculture, with maize productivity levels falling by more …
EcocentricTechnology
Another blueprint for the Green Green Revolution was announced today at the 3rd International Rice Congress, and this time it’s all about — you guessed it — rice. Well, according to rice types anyway (the corn guys might have a different theory). But the scientists that unveiled the Global Rice Science Partnership (GRiSP), a …
EcocentricWater
Happy World Water Week! Yes, it’s that time of year again, as water wonks who spend their worthy careers thinking about how to get more people access to clean H20 kick off meetings in Stockholm today. So as you kick back on your sprinkled lawn or float in your pool this Labor Day, spare a moment to consider water, the element that puts …
EcocentricOil
With the coastal cleanup apparently downshifting and BP in the final stages of preparing for a static kill operation to help close the well, we may all soon need something new to obsess/post about. But the battle on the spill is actually just shifting fronts—from the Gulf coast and wetlands that have been the focus of coverage and …
EcocentricFood
That’s the conclusion from a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Two Stanford researchers looked at the effects of the Green Revolution—the half-century old transition to more intensified agriculture, with more fertilizers and more irrigation—to see what impact the shift might have had on global …
