The desert sky was an odd brooding gray as we pulled into McDonald's, the arches looming bright and preternaturally yellow out of the dusty landscape. By the time we'd finished our McKebab sandwiches — much better than you might expect — it was raining: a steady, drumming, respectable rain. It almost never rains in Israel's Arava Valley, the driest, hottest and southernmost part of Israel. I was about to meet a desert botanist, Elaine Solowey, so I was anxious to hear what she'd say. I assumed she'd be excited about the rain and wax rhapsodic about making the desert bloom and all ... Read More
The Making of the Ocean Health Index
July 12, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
If all goes well, when a scientific paper is published and the media pick up on the story, a lot of effort gets boiled down into a soundbite. New cure for cancer discovered. Water found on Mars. Fish stocks disappearing from the world's oceans. This focus can be a good thing for communicating science to the public, but it masks a lot of what was necessary to produce that result. Often, the story of how, and why, science gets done is as interesting and important as the actual result. Indeed, the decisions about what does not belong in the soundbite are as critical as the decisions about what ... Read More
Green Habits Stay Home on Vacation
July 1, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
School's out, and many people who diligently bike or take the bus to work have bought their plane tickets for vacation. They may not know or care that flying will dramatically increase their carbon footprint. Using a kind of "moral accounting," people who thriftily save fuel getting to work may feel they've done "their fair share" and can indulge themselves in their time off, says a Norwegian study titled, "Troublesome Leisure Travel." This is the unintended side effect of building compact cities, promoting environmental awareness and telecommuting — three of the most common policies for ... Read More
Oregonians Embrace Ethos of Reducing Consumption
June 24, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Pollsters are seldom shocked by the responses they receive, but Tom Bowerman and Ezra Markowitz of the Eugene, Ore.-based nonprofit PolicyInteractive were genuinely amazed by the results of their 2008 statewide survey. They asked Oregonians to opine on the wisdom of reducing their level of energy consumption. To their amazement, they found 88 percent agreed with the sentiment. Over a series of follow-up polls, they attempted to shake that number, but they never got less than 74 percent agreement. Bowman recently discussed their "exploratory research project" and its implications for the ... Read More
Energy Conservation Through the Lens of Faith
May 30, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Advocates of green living are often eager to support their cause by referencing benefits of an eco-friendly life style. The rewards for conserving energy in the home or driving a hybrid car include lower energy bills, fewer trips to the gas pumps and knowing that the air is a bit less toxic. In recent years, however, voices within progressive religion have elevated the cause to a higher plateau. Within the three monotheistic traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, an effort grounded in a shared theology has spawned Interfaith Power and Light, a national organization that preaches ... Read More
Save the Birds — With Doppler Radar
April 28, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
After slogging through knee-deep water, past palmetto thickets and trumpet vines dangling from the treetops, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Mike Lange stops short. He signals toward a gnarled live oak, straight out of the magical charm of The Shire, its trunk the width of a car. Crumpled resurrection ferns line its branches, waiting to sprout in green abandon with the next rains. Nearby, the trunks of an elm and a water hickory wrap around each other like a sculpture of intertwined lovers. Lange is rightly proud of these woods. Over the past 20 years, he has been largely ... Read More
Could Tidal Flow Fix Your Airport?
March 21, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Out with the Canadian geese, in with the least sandpipers. That’s a New Year’s resolution nearly 25 years in the making for the public airport in Santa Barbara, Calif., where big-bird-fearing pilots and small-bird-loving environmentalists are both celebrating the return of Pacific Ocean tides to the surrounding wetlands. The once controversial idea — which required flexibility on the part of the Federal Aviation Administration and plenty of patience from everyone else involved — will improve the environment while making flying safer and, therefore, cheaper. One airport has ... Read More
When Bird Watching Means Dog Watching
March 20, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Jennifer Stroh hasn’t forgotten the day 10 years ago when two western snowy plover chicks were spotted on the beach at Coal Oil Point, a popular surfing spot near the University of California campus in Santa Barbara. Nobody had seen a plover chick at the point for 30 years. The entire Pacific coast snowy plover population was on the federal list of threatened species. In California, the birds had stopped nesting at 33 out of 53 coastal breeding locations, driven away by human footprints, mechanized beach raking, dredging and mining operations, and the construction of seawalls and ... Read More
Can We Avoid Devouring the Planet?
March 4, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
What's for dinner? Ever more people with ever increasing purchasing power, particularly in developing nations, means that a lot more food is going to be needed to feed humanity. But where are the new farmlands going to go, in an already crowded planet? Is it possible to feed the world without also plowing under every natural area? This question is especially pressing in the tropics, where the the majority of available land for agricultural expansion is located. Dr. Holly Gibbs, a geographer and postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University, has been tracking the growth of agriculture in ... Read More
Recovery of the Island Fox
January 10, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
One of the most dramatic and successful recovery efforts for an endangered species can be found in the Channel Islands, just offshore of Southern California. Even though the islands are currently almost unpopulated, they haven't been spared from the impacts of human actions. A combination of over a century of ranching and of the effects of the pesticide DDT had left many of the unique species on the islands teetering on the brink of extinction. In particular, the Island Fox, the most prominent unique species on the the Channel Islands, had quickly declined to under a hundred less than 10 years ... Read More
