Querido DiálogoEcológico: Una serie de productos, incluyendo el papel y la ropa—y hasta cerveza y ciertos alimentos—se hacen a base del cáñamo. ¿Qué es lo que hace al cáñamo tan versátil, y por qué es ilegal cultivarlo en los Estados Unidos? ¿Es ilegal también en Canadá?
Querido DiálogoEcológico: ¿Es cierto que las selvas húmedas contienen quizás miles de plantas y hierbas con propiedades medicinales?
As the weather gets colder and many of us batten down for winter, it’s a great time to start drawing up plans for those improvements you’ve been contemplating. Go green and you can make an important individual contribution to the environment, help take a bite out of global warming, and save money over the long haul, too.
Rice farming may look pretty from a distance, with its bucolic images of farmers in conical hats ankle deep in water as they cultivate green sprouts, but it has earned a bad environmental reputation because of its wasteful irrigation systems and incursions into wetlands. But not all rice farming is environmentally destructive.
The manure from pooping cows, collected by “alley scrapers” that run along the floor like a giant squeegee, is processed into renewable electricity.
When it comes to solid waste, most people think of candy wrappers, soda bottles and Styrofoam packing peanuts instead of the house they’re living in or the Target where they shop. However, the EPA estimates that up to 40 percent of U.S. solid waste is construction and demolition debris. Deconstruction—taking homes and commercial buildings apart, rather than landfilling the waste—does involve more labor than demolition, but it also avoids costly disposal fees. What had been a total loss—demolition and landfilling—turns into a revenue-generating opportunity to resell what was previously waste.
Last October, Iceland announced it would resume hunting great whales, breaking a 20-year moratorium on commercial whaling. Icelandic whalers will be allowed to kill nine endangered fin whales and 30 smaller, more abundant minkes by the end of August. The killing has already begun: By the end of last November, whalers had killed seven fins, producing a storm of international criticism.
India’s exploding housing sector in high-tech centers like Pune and Bangalore is finally seeing green development to satisfy the demands of more sophisticated and environmentally-conscious consumers—and improve the bottom line for developers.
Just in time for the busy holiday travel season, the non-profit Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) released a new report last week scolding the airline industry for the shocking amount of otherwise recyclable waste it discards every year. The report, entitled "Trash Landings: How Airlines and Airports Can Clean Up Their Recycling Programs," also details creative solutions undertaken by some airlines to boost recycling efforts.
A bipartisan group including the CEOs of Fedex, UPS and Dow Chemical, along with some of the nation’s best known retired generals, has come together to urge the White House to push for a new energy policy that reduces U.S. dependence on foreign oil. The group, which calls itself the Energy Security Leadership Council (ESLC), warns that weaning the country off foreign oil won’t be enough, and that the White House and Congress need to take decisive action to promote homegrown alternatives as soon as possible.
Tropical rainforests, which account for only seven percent of the world’s total land mass, harbor as much as half of all known varieties of plants. Experts say that just a four-square mile area of rainforest may contain as many as 1,500 different types of flowering plants
