As I write this, it is mid September 2006. I am writing in a sun-drenched room at our cottage in Ontario, thinking of the unrolling events of the last few months. It is a surprising time with some light events and some very dark ones. For me, the light, bright events, come from the birth […]
NASA’s Earth Observation newsroom presents satelite images to go with the geological map of Mississippi Meanders used to make the top image of this blog. NASA explains: As it winds from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi River is in constant flux. Fast water carries sediment while slow water deposits it. Soft riverbanks […]
Global International Waters Assessment is a systematic assessment of the environmental conditions and problems in large transboundary waters, comprising marine, coastal and freshwater areas, and surface waters as well as ground waters. Involving over 1,500 expert it has assessed 66 of the world’s major river basins and recently published a synthesis report. These publications are […]
Eugene Linden a journalist, who has recently published a book on climate change – The Winds of Change: Climate, Weather, and the Destruction of Civilizations, in Jan 2006 wrote an article Cloudy With a Chance of Chaos in the US business magazine Fortune. In it he discusses how ecological degredation has lead to a decline […]
Elizabeth Kolbert, a writer for the New Yorker, who also wrote a series of articles – Climate of Man – about climate change. Wrote a fairly grim article Watermark: can southern Louisiana be saved, in the Feb 27, 2006 New Yorker. She writes about geology, wetland loss, climate change, and people of New Orleans. Five […]
George Boody and colleagues used a scenario-development exercise to discover that some types of changes in agricultural management can lead to economic benefits as well as improvements in the delivery of multiple ecosystem services.(Boody et al. 2005. Multifunctional agrcitulture in the United States. BioScience 55: 27 – 38.) The team of 17 members (including farmers, […]
Current industrial agricultural practices, particularly the overuse of fertilizer and its sloppy management, frequently create a tradeoff between agricultural production and coastal eutrophication. That is increases in agricultural yields have produced low oxygen zones around the world. The UNEP Global Environmental Outlook 2003 maps the location of coastal anoxic zones world wide (somewhat confusingly the […]
Richard Sparks writes about the ecological/geological context in which New Orleans exists, how people have changed them, and what rebuilders should consider. His article is Rethinking, Then Rebuilding New Orleans, in the Winter 2006 Issues in Science and Technology. His article focusses on the natural forces that have shaped the Mississippi and how humans have […]