“These are not rich communities,” says Adam Warren, group manager for the deployment group of the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). “It really put people in a bind. I think island leaders know if oil goes back up to $140 a barrel and they haven’t done anything, they’ll be held responsible.”
Category
Environment
Upgrading the Electric Grid With Flywheels and Air
Because wind power is generated only when the wind blows, and solar energy isn’t collected on a cloudy day, technologies that can store extra power when it’s not being used and mete it out when needed are becoming increasingly important.
Canadian Rain Forest Edges Oil Pipeline Path
The pipeline would pass through watersheds important to Canada’s commercial fishing industry and brush past Coastal First Nations lands and the Great Bear Rainforest, a protected coastal area filled with red cedars, spruce, and the elusive all-white “spirit bear.”
Urban Foragers Cropping Up in U.S.
In Sacramento, they pick figs, kumquats, and plums from public trees. In New York, they harvest purslane–an edible flower–from the cracks in the sidewalk. Down south, it’s fiddlehead ferns, and just about everywhere, people are picking black walnuts, wild mushrooms, and dandelion greens.
Urban foraging–gathering fruit, vegetables, and other useful things from parks, lawns, and sidewalks–isn’t a new thing. But as more urbanites become aware of the free bounty surrounding them, new issues are–pardon the pun–cropping up. When a public park’s berry patch is raided, whose responsibility is it to make sure there are some left for everyone to enjoy? What about pesticides?
Mobile Apps Help Find Sustainable Seafood
Not too long ago, if you wanted to know what type of seafood was best for the environment, your tools didn’t get any more high-tech than a wallet card or a fridge magnet. But the fridge magnet doesn’t help much when you’re at the grocery store, and wallet cards are easy to leave behind (just … Continue Reading
Compost Cab Helps City Dwellers Turn Garbage to Soil
from National Geographic’s Green Guide If you live in a city, you might have a window box or a pot of tomatoes on your balcony. You might even be lucky enough to have a small backyard garden. But do you compost? Probably not: composting in a small space is tough, not to mention smelly. You … Continue Reading
3 Future Oil-Spill Fighters: Sponges, Superbugs, and Herders
Amid efforts to cap the seafloor leak, cleanup workers have been using boat-based skimmers to pick up the oil, booms to gather the slick for burning, and chemical dispersants to break the crude into smaller droplets—all parts of the oil-fighting toolkit for decades. Soon, though, tech of the future could be cleaning up spills like this one.
Feathers at Your Nest: Spotting Wild Birds
MARY PFAFFKO was on her way back from the gym, walking down Connecticut Avenue, and there it was. A wood thrush, common in the East but rarely seen outside deeply wooded areas. But there it was, right on the street. The only problem was that it was dead. In her role as president of the … Continue Reading
One For Me, One For You
No matter how well-meaning but misguided, you’d never toss a holiday gift (not even the heinous reindeer coffee mug from the office Secret Santa). And the whole re-gifting thing can be a serious faux pas if you get caught. But that doesn’t mean you should relegate those unmentionables to catching dust in the far corner … Continue Reading
Blues, Jazz fest to go green
Erie Times-News Published June 29, 2007 by Rachel Kaufman Erie Art Museum’s annual Blues and Jazz Festival is pioneering three environmentally friendly initiatives that could make Erie a cleaner, greener place to live. The festival, which takes place in Frontier Park the first weekend in August, will sell “green tags” to fund the purchase of … Continue Reading