Earth Wise

Why should you care whether there are trees on your street or on the streets nearby?  Besides the obvious fact that they make streets more attractive, street trees provide a number of real benefits both for residents and for the environment.  Street trees improve air quality by consuming carbon dioxide and emitting oxygen.  They cut […]

Ebola. Hantavirus. Lyme disease. What do they have in common? Like most emerging infectious diseases, they originated in mammals. So many debilitating pathogens make the jump from wildlife and livestock to humans, yet at the global scale little is known about where people are most at risk of outbreaks. In an attempt to help forecast […]

One of the strategies to tackle the problem of increasing greenhouse gas emissions that are resulting in climate change is Carbon Capture and Storage or CCS, which seeks to prevent CO2 from entering the atmosphere and to instead tuck it away somewhere.   A longstanding approach to doing it is to store it underground in voids such […]

Organic food is increasingly popular.  Food chains like Sprouts and Whole Foods as well as local food coops and health food stores have led the charge.  More recently, major supermarket chains have growing organic departments in their stores.  In fact, in 2015, sales of organic foods in the U.S. reached $43 billion, an increase of […]

Few of us cook with palm oil or have ever even seen the stuff.  Nevertheless, half of the world’s consumer products include it as an ingredient and the global market for palm oil could be as high as $50 billion.   The palm oil industry has been tied to environmental destruction in countries such as Malaysia […]

It’s no secret that our oceans are full of plastic.  Plastic trash can be found on up to 88% of the oceans’ surfaces, with most of the debris concentrated in the top two meters of water.  The plastics gather in certain areas of the ocean due to the swirling nature of ocean currents, known as […]

Giant pandas are among the most beloved animals in the world and are the iconic symbol of China as well as of the World Wildlife Fund, the global NGO dedicated to wildlife conservation.  In the mid 1990s, the population of wild pandas dropped to as low as 1,000 as a result of habitat loss, habitat […]

The U.S. recently celebrated the milestone of having one million solar installations nationwide.   It took 40 years to get there, but experts believe the next million could take only a couple of years.   The solar revolution is clearly well underway. However, it isn’t a revolution for everybody.  Solar power has been very slow to reach […]

The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has reached 400 parts per million and is still rising.   Climate scientists say that 450 parts per million would be dangerously high.  Many experts say that we really need to get back to 350 parts per million.  We are trying to prevent global temperatures from rising more […]

The luminous glow of the Milky Way, the galaxy that contains our Solar System, has inspired everything from stories and songs to paintings and poems for centuries.  But now one third of the people on the planet – including 80% of Americans and 60% of Europeans – cannot see the Milky Way at night because […]