Archive for December 2022

Wasted food – and land, labor, chemicals, water and energy. ATU Images via Getty Images You saw it at Thanksgiving, and you’ll likely see it at your next holiday feast: piles of unwanted food – unfinished second helpings, underwhelming kitchen experiments and the like – all dressed up with no place to go, except the…

Northern California has some of the strongest offshore winds in the U.S., with immense potential to produce clean energy. But it also has a problem. Its continental shelf drops off quickly, making building traditional wind turbines directly on the seafloor costly if not impossible. Once water gets more than about 200 feet deep – roughly…

Construction in the Chinese-financed Port City complex in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Oct. 19, 2022. Pradeep Dambarage/NurPhoto via Getty Images More than one-third of all people in the world live in cities, towns and villages on coasts. They rely on healthy oceans for many things, including food, income, a stable climate and ready connections to nature.…

Residents of Miami’s Little Haiti have been fighting plans for a luxury development for several years. AP Photo/Lynne Sladky Miami’s Little Haiti has been an immigrant community for decades. Its streets are lined with small homes and colorful shops that cater to the neighborhood, a predominantly Afro-Caribbean population with a median household income well below…

A short-tailed weasel in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming. Jacob W. Frank, NPS/Flickr At the United Nations biodiversity conference that opens in Montreal on Dec. 7, 2022, nations aim to create a new global framework for transforming humanity’s relationship with nature. The conference logo features a human reaching to embrace a panda – but from an…

Red knots stop to feed along the Delaware shore as they migrate from the high Arctic to South America. Gregory Breese, USFWS/Flickr A biodiversity crisis is reducing the variety of life on Earth. Under pressure from land and water pollution, development, overhunting, poaching, climate change and species invasions, approximately 1 million plant and animal species…

Redwood forests like this one in California can store large amounts of carbon, but not if they’re being cut down. Shane Coffield Many of the companies promising “net-zero” emissions to protect the climate are relying on vast swaths of forests and what are known as carbon offsets to meet that goal. On paper, carbon offsets…