Most homes are not lacking in ways they can be healthier for family and kinder to the environment. For one, indoor air quality is a serious problem affecting millions of homes. Studies show that air within homes can be more seriously polluted than the air outdoors
The rooftop at St. Simon Stock Catholic School on East 182nd Street in the Bronx, New York is a lone patch of green in the quilt of gray, beige and black that stretches across the southeast Bronx. Six inches of a patented, lightweight growing medium called Gaia Soil covers 3,500 square feet, divided into plots for both elementary and graduate school research. The roof hosts 20 native species: delicate columbine flowers, milkweed that attracts migrating Monarch butterflies, tomato and cucumber plants, and black-eyed susans, favored by bumblebees.
Most homes are not lacking in ways they can be healthier for family and kinder to the environment. For one, indoor air quality is a serious problem affecting millions of homes. Studies show that air within homes can be more seriously polluted than the air outdoors—even in the largest and most industrialized cities.
For the first time, national environmental groups are looking beyond federal politics and allocating a portion of their campaign financing to state elections in California, New York and elsewhere. The Sierra Club is spending a third of its $4 million campaign budget on state races. The League of Conservation Voters is chipping in 10 percent of its $7 million political war chest to state contests as well.
Last week, the New York-based Blacksmith Group, a nonprofit dedicated to solving pollution problems in the developing world, released the results of a recent study of the world’s most polluted places. According to the group, sites in Russia, India, Peru, Zambia, China and the Dominican Republic topped the list of locations that qualify as ecological nightmares. Most of the problem areas lack strong environmental laws and suffer from unchecked development and/or resource extraction.
With its back-to-the-future curves and swoops, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Marin, California Civic Center feels like the perfect venue for hosting the annual Bioneers conference. A sprawling complex of streamlined colonnades, perfectly round auditoriums and sky-blue roofs, Wright’s design manages to come off as at once strikingly futuristic and—now decades old—comfortably familiar. The center is a fine example of wild creativity meeting stolid pragmatism, which seems very much the point of the Bioneers" gathering of eco-visionaries from around the world.
Dominica is now becoming known for something else than a long-ago visit by Christopher Columbus. The “nature isle” is now synonymous with longevity. At 29 miles long and 16 miles wide, with a population of 70,000, Dominica boasts 20 centenarians, and has the second-highest longevity in the western hemisphere (second only to Canada).
According to Yale University’s Climate Initiative, this Ivy League school in New Haven, Connecticut produced greenhouse gas emissions of 285,000 metric tons in 2002, more than 30 developing nations. Most of those emissions come from power plants, purchased power and on-campus buildings. But things are looking up. Last year, Yale President Richard Levin announced the university’s commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 10 percent below its 1990 levels by 2020.
Although it is the lightest element on the planet, liberating hydrogen from its molecular bonds can be a dirty process. However, a $250,000 demonstration project recently unveiled in Maine may be the bridge that leads to a clean hydrogen future.
Like the beleaguered Cape Wind Project in Nantucket Sound, wind farms in Australia have faced opposition from communities that do not want their views disrupted by wind turbines. In 2004, Wind Power Pty Ltd landed government approval to build a 52-turbine wind farm in the rural area of Bald Hills, but then the locals protested, writing more than 1,500 letters to the planning board. So the governing party decided to kill the project and put the blame on an endangered local parrot.
