Every year, the Environmental Working Group ranks pesticide contamination in 47 popular fruits and vegetables for its Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides in Produce. The environmental nonprofit has created this ranking annually since 2004.
Deserts are barren areas of land where little precipitation occurs, resulting in living conditions that are hostile for plant and animal life. These regions are typically defined by low average annual rainfall—usually 100 millimeters (less than 4 inches) of rain per year or less.
Neonicotinoids (or ‘neonics’ for short) are a class of insecticides chemically related to nicotine. In fact, the name ‘neonicotinoid’ literally means “new nicotine-like insecticide.” And like nicotine, neonics act on certain kinds of receptors in the nerve synapse. Most corn, soy, and wheat seeds planted today are coated with neonics, which is reportedly 5,000 to 10,000 times more toxic than DDT.
Herbicide-resistant weeds are becoming a more and more common problem for farmers growing grain and vegetable crops. As a result, the farmers are looking for alternatives to herbicides to control weeds. One promising approach is the use of cover crops, which are planted in the off season to protect the soil. Thick cover crop growth can often compete well with weeds during the cover crop growth period, and can prevent most germinated weed seeds from completing their life cycle and reproducing.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, located nearly 400 feet beneath the earth’s surface and fully funded by the Norwegian government, offers any government access to seeds in case of natural or man-made disaster. It’s more often referred to as the Doomsday Seed Vault. And ironically, it too is threatened by climate change.
American Electric Power (AEP) is investing $4.5 billion to build the largest wind farm in the United States at a site in the Oklahoma panhandle. Known as the Wind Catcher Energy Connection, the 2-gigawatt wind project will include 800 2.5-megawatt wind turbines built by General Electric.
Earth system scientists say that there are four major human-caused forces that threaten to cause irreversible and abrupt environmental upheaval: climate change, deforestation, biodiversity loss, and excess nitrogen.
According to a European food safety watchdog, most applications of neonicotinoids – the world’s most widely used insecticides – represent a risk to wild bees and honeybees. The use of these insecticides has been restricted in Europe since 2014 following earlier risk assessments.
Orangutans are some of the planet’s most intelligent animals. In fact, orangutans and human beings share 97% of their DNA sequence. Orangutans can only be found in the wild in Southeast Asia on the Indonesian island of Sumatra and the island of Borneo, which is a landmass shared by Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei. And while all orangutans are endangered, the critically-endangered Bornean orangutans are under exceptional duress.
Utility-scale solar installations have been expanding rapidly. The amount of land used for solar projects is becoming quite substantial. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) predicts that 3 million acres will be devoted to solar farms by 2030, and 6 million by 2050. These numbers pale in comparison with the land used for corn, soybeans, and wheat, but are more than used for such familiar crops as oats, barley and rice.
One of the major causes of the increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere is deforestation. We chop down about 15 billion trees each year. Over time, our activities have reduced the number of trees on earth by about 50%. We do plant trees – these days, about 9 billion a year. It is a substantial number, but still leaves a net loss of 6 billion trees annually.
Near-shore fish farms have created many environmental problems. Raising large numbers of fish creates concentrations of fish waste and sea lice, which can adversely impact near-shore ecosystems.
There’s no argument to be made about whether 2017 was hot or not. The only uncertainty is whether it was the second or third warmest year ever recorded.
Predators and scavengers are widely persecuted by people because they are often harmful to property, livestock, and human beings. Nonetheless, research has shown that many of these animals play important roles in ecosystems and their removal can be quite harmful.
The Paris Climate Agreement embodies a commitment to hold the increase in the global average temperature to less than 2 Celsius degrees above preindustrial levels. Most strategies to achieve this goal involve reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from human activities such as burning fossil fuels as well as various land use activities. But there are also so-called Natural Climate Solutions, which relate to the storage of carbon and reduction in carbon emissions across global forests, wetlands, grasslands, and agricultural lands.
Plants are the world’s great storehouse of carbon dioxide. That is why deforestation is a major contributor to climate change. If only there were more trees and plants, more of the CO2 in the atmosphere would be absorbed and could no longer trap heat in the atmosphere.
Biomimicry is learning from and then emulating nature’s forms, processes, and ecosystems to create more sustainable designs. Mother Nature is already the inspiration for countless products and designs ranging from Velcro copied from plant burs to the shape of wind turbines modeled after whale fins. There are wetsuits inspired by beaver pelts and office buildings that copy termite dens. Increasingly, innovators are looking at nature for designs in architecture, chemistry, agriculture, energy, health, transportation, computing, and even for the structure of organizations and cities.
Large portions of the Midwest are called the Corn Belt and for good reason. Overall, about 90 million acres or 140,000 square miles of the United States are planted with corn and about half of that is in Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska and Minnesota. In most of the Corn Belt, the corn is planted in rotation with soybeans. Both are warm weather crops and the soil is left barren for nearly half of the year when the two crops are out of season.
There is much to be said in favor of organic food. The organic produce industry took in $65 billion in 2016 and that farming method is clearly increasingly popular and is here to stay. Nevertheless, there are various misconceptions and inaccuracies related to organic food.
The impacts of increased carbon dioxide and the changing climate are often complicated and, it turns out, not always negative. In some areas of the world, people can actually benefit from increased CO2 and climate change. Barley, the most important feed crop for beef production in Alberta, Canada, as well as the province’s beef industry itself actually stand to gain from the changes that are most assuredly not a good thing for much of the world.