ENVIRONMENT

Posts in "Environment"

Environment Health

The Food Industry Can Address Climate Change through Healthy Soil

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As I walked through the verdant fields filled with a dazzling array of sorghum, hairy vetch, daikon radish, collards, cowpeas, clover, millet, kale, and other crops, I was struck by how different this field looked relative to so many other farms I’ve walked over the years. When we conducted a spade test, digging out a section of the soil with a simple tool, it revealed heavily clumped, rich brown matter with visible earthworms: soil life.

Link:https://civileats.com/2017/11/10/soil-matters-more-than-you-think/

Environment

Monarch Butterflies Migrate 3,000 Miles—Here’s How

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Each fall, millions of monarch butterflies leave their summer breeding grounds in the northeastern U.S. and Canada and travel upwards of 3,000 miles to reach overwintering grounds in southwestern Mexico.

Link: https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/10/monarch-butterfly-migration/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Social&utm_content=link_tw20171018news-monarchbutterflies&utm_campaign=Content&sf122929412=1

Environment

Meet Frida, the valiant Lab who’s saved a dozen lives in Mexico

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One of Mexico’s most beloved rescuers wears wide protective goggles, a harness and two pairs of boots.

Frida is the star of the Mexican navy’s Canine Unit. Throughout her career, the 7-year-old Labrador has detected 52 people — 12 alive — in various natural disasters.

She detected the body of a police officer in Juchitan after an earthquake hit the state of Oaxaca two weeks ago.

Link: https://www.latimes.com/world/mexico-americas/la-fg-mexico-earthquake-frida-dog-20170921-story.html

Environment Society

This Furniture Is Made Out of Mushrooms

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SEBASTIAN COX WAS walking through his four-acre woodland when he saw two branches from hazel trees stuck together.

“When I pried them apart I realized that what was keeping them together was fungus,” he said.

Fast forward eighteen months and Cox is holding a fully formed, fungus-made lamp and stool in his workshop in southeast London.

Link: https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/09/mushroom-fungi-furniture-video-spd/

Education Environment

Plastic-degrading fungus found in Pakistan rubbish dump

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Scientists believe they may have discovered one solution to the planet’s growing level of plastic waste in the form of a plastic-eating fungus.

Researchers who set out to find a naturally occurring means of degrading waste plastic safely, extracted samples from a rubbish dump outside Islamabad in Pakistan and found a soil fungus that was feeding on plastic.

Link: https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/plastic-degrading-fungus-pakistan-rubbish-dump-islamabad-dr-sehroon-khan-a7962046.html

Environment Science

Solar Power and Honey Bees Make a Sweet Combo in Minnesota

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Last year, when Minnesota passed a groundbreaking law on best practices for providing pollinator habitat at solar power sites, they also (unexpectedly) helped launch something called Solar Honey, in which solar companies and commercial beekeepers work together in a mutually beneficial arrangement.

Link: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/solar-power-and-honey-bees-180964743/

Economy Environment

The Last Death-Defying Honey Hunter of Nepal

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Three hundred feet in the air, Mauli Dhan dangles on a bamboo rope ladder, surveying the section of granite he must climb to reach his goal: a pulsing mass of thousands of Himalayan giant honeybees. They carpet a crescent-shaped hive stretching almost six feet below a granite overhang. The bees are guarding gallons of a sticky, reddish fluid known as mad honey, which, thanks to its hallucinogenic properties, sells on Asian black markets for $60 to $80 a pound—roughly six times the price of regular Nepali honey.

Link: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/07/honey-hunters-bees-climbing-nepal/

Economy Environment

How Mushrooms Could Repair Our Crumbling Infrastructure

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The U.S. has one of the most advanced economies in the world. And yet the concrete infrastructure that supports it—the roads, bridges, sidewalks, and so on—is slowly crumbling. This deterioration requires complex repairs, causes long delays, and in the most severe cases can lead to structural failure.

Link: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608717/how-mushrooms-could-repair-our-crumbling-infrastructure/

Environment Health

In the dirt with Ron Finley, the Gangsta Gardener

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Ron Finley is standing in the deep end of an Olympic-sized swimming pool. The pool is empty, has been empty for years, the water long ago replaced by an elaborate garden. The garden overflows the geometry of the pool, growing up the sides, in and out of buckets and boxes and pails, around brightly painted artwork and a mural painted by one of Finley’s three grown sons, two of whom are artists.

Link: https://www.latimes.com/food/dailydish/la-fo-ron-finley-project-20170503-story.html