The recession may have robbed city governments of the wherewithal to enhance public places. But some undaunted architects, planners, and community activists are trying urban design experiments that are deliberately cheap, temporary, and unofficial. And sometimes these modest but audacious interventions lead to altered municipal policies and lasting changes in the cityscape. Take an effort called the Better Block, which launched with an unofficial event in Dallas in April 2010. For one weekend, community activists anted up just under $1,000 and used mostly borrowed materials and their own ... Read More
New Dirt on Climate Change
January 13, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
For decades, geologists have been drilling — literally — for clues that would help them understand ancient wholesale changes in Earth’s climate, clues that could shed light on current global warming. Usually, their efforts have been aimed at sea sediments taken from cores extracted hundreds of feet beneath the ocean floor. But in a more terrestrial project this past summer, an international geological team led by the University of New Hampshire began deep-core drilling at three sites in Wyoming’s Bighorn Basin east of Yellowstone National Park. These six new core samples from ... Read More
Saving Whales by Putting a Price on Their Tail?
January 11, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
For decades, whalers and those opposed to whaling have been locked in a pitched battle over the fate of the world’s largest mammals, many species of which are threatened or endangered. Anti-whaling groups, including Greenpeace, Sea Shepherd, and the World Wildlife Fund, spend some $25 million every year on efforts ranging from education to dangerous confrontations on the high seas to stop whaling. Yet, the number of whales killed each year continues to grow, having doubled since the early 1990s, according to International Whaling Commission figures. As a staff writer at the Bren School ... Read More