Posts tagged “Environment”

A lot of our problems are the same problem

recycling simply does not work to reduce the amount of plastic in the world”. And although the public’s enthusiasm for anti-plastic campaigns is partly motivated by the feeling that it is a simpler and more solvable problem than climate change, the two issues are more closely connected than most people realise. Seven of the 10 […]

Imagination shouldn’t guide natural disaster preparedness

Stephen Harper said as an Albertan, he never imagined there could be a flood of such magnitude in this part of Canada. via Calgary floods: Residents grapple with devastation in Alberta | Canada | News | National Post. As Prime Minister, Stephen Harper shouldn’t just have imagined such a scenario, he should have been preparing […]

While you’re waiting for the bus

You can work for UPS if you’ve got a bad back, but not if you’re pregnant. Voter suppression scares the bejeezus out of me. Only rich white folks deserve to vote? I think overcast days are actually rather nice. My biggest obstacle to getting a job outside of academia is that most jobs are utter […]

While you’re waiting for the bus

The enormous cost of propping of the banks was justified by the refrain “too big to fail.” You know what’s really too big to fail? Ecosystems. Zen Faulkes wonders about the constant pressure to explain the relevance of your science: People love all sorts of things that aren’t relevant to them apart from their own […]

Trees are good for more than timber

Alberta should stop digging up the oil sands and build a nanocrystalline cellulose factory instead – turning trees into a light, strong, transparent material that conducts electricity. Sensible forestry practices are far less environmentally damaging than oil sands development. Plus, if we’re clever about it, using trees for NCC could help slow climate change by […]

ESA Interviews – Ana Elisa Perez-Quintero

I interviewed awesome ecologists at the 2011 Ecological Society of America meeting in exchange for reader donations, which paid for my conference attendance. This is the last – but certainly not the least – in a series of posts about those interviews. I met Ana-Elisa through the SEEDS program. Every year, ESA’s SEEDS program brings […]

Invasive species – making the best of a bad situation

Thus they made a covenant at Beersheba. So Abimelech rose with Phichol, the commander of his army, and they returned to the land of the Philistines. Then Abraham planted a tamarisk tree in Beersheba, and there called on the name of the LORD, the Everlasting God. And Abraham stayed in the land of the Philistines […]