Most of our own direct contributions to global warming pertain to the modes of travel we choose. For starters, air travel burns more fossil fuels per person than any other form of transport.
Querido DiálogoEcológico: El mercadeo de gaseosas a escolares hizo mucha noticia el año pasado. ¿Cuál es el problema con las bebidas gaseosas y dónde puedo encontrar alternativas más sanas que todavía tienen efervescencia?
Querido DiálogoEcológico: ¿Cuál es la manera más ecologica de lavar mi auto: haciéndolo yo mismo o llevándolo al túnel de lavado local?
No one told Salamatou Adamou about the "birth dearth." A midwife and widow, she had already given birth to 12 children by the age of 37. "I am exhausted," she said as she struggled through labor with child number 13. Her large family is not all that unusual in drought-stricken Niger, a country where widespread poverty combines with strict patriarchy, early marriages, a lack of health care access and educational opportunities for women, sanctioned polygamy and adherence to fundamentalist Islamic tenets on procreation to produce the highest birth rate in the world, eight children for every woman.
In mid-2005, women around the world had an average of 2.7 children, according to the Population Reference Bureau. That seven-tenths of a percentage point above replacement level may not seem like a lot, but it is contributing to a dramatic population expansion, from 6.4 to 9.2 billion, between now and 2050.
The U.S. is the only industrialized nation with significant population growth, and a new report sees those burgeoning numbers as a factor in our unparalleled impact on the environment.
Wangari Maathai, Nobel Peace Prize winner and founder of Kenya’s acclaimed Greenbelt Movement, last week announced the launch of a new initiative by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) calling on concerned individuals, community groups, schools, businesses and governments around the world to work toward achieving the collective goal of planting one billion trees during 2007 to combat global warming.
A new study by the environmental research organization Worldwatch has found that consumers are playing an increasingly large role in dictating the terms of how fish and other seafood are harvested around the world. Brian Halweil, who wrote "Catch of the Day: Choosing Seafood for Healthier Oceans" for Worldwatch, reports that seafood eaters have become an unlikely ally to the world’s beleaguered fish populations.
In the early 1990s, I lived in Lagos, Nigeria. It is an intensely crowded city, and more people live on the street or in cardboard huts than in apartments or homes. Traffic is gridlocked 24-7. Vendors squat alongside every roadway selling bananas and rice, large grilled rodents euphemistically called "bushmeat," and tiny packets of Chiclets gum.
Few people realize that washing our cars in our driveways is one of the most environmentally un-friendly chores we can do around the house. Unlike household waste water that enters sewers or septic systems and undergoes treatment before it is discharged into the environment
Soft drinks can be found most anywhere in the world, but nowhere are they as ubiquitous as in the United States, where 450 different types are sold and more than 2.5 million vending machines dispense them around the clock
