My dream car: After the hybrids, the Toyota Yaris is the most fuel efficient car on the market. But still ...
For nearly four years, I haven’t owned a car. And now I want a car. But that wish is in direct conflict with my environmental values, especially today.
This morning I ran the numbers again, and confirmed that I have enough money for a down payment. I’ve been dreaming of getting behind the wheel of a sporty little something, in stickshift, cranking the tunes, hitting the road and driving, west probably, for days. Maybe I’d even put my stuff in storage and sign out of my apartment; I’ve had quite enough of walls. I’ve been thinking: I would just like to drive now.
Also this morning, the EPA put out its annual report on our country’s greenhouse gas emissions, showing that they increased in 2007 by 1.4 percent over the year before. The main ingredient of our greenhouse gas emissions is carbon dioxide. The main way we put carbon dioxide into the air is by burning coal for electricity. Driving cars is a pretty close second.
Greenhouse gas emissions by people have, of course, been implicated in global rises in temperature.
Furthermore, the wires are abuzz today with a new study out of the University of Arizona and Biosphere 2, showing that drought-affected pinon pines in the desert southwest are especially vulnerable to death by rising temperatures, even if the droughts don’t get worse.
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On the surface, obesity looks to be a self-inflicted wound. Too much food and not enough exercise, right?
Not so simple.
A new study in PLoS ONE adds heft to a link between pesticides and obesity that’s been emerging for the past several years. Soo Lim, of the Department of Internal Medicine at Seoul National University College in Korea, is lead author. Lim and colleagues exposed a group of lab mice to low levels of the common pesticide atrazine. Then, they divided the group: half the mice ate a fatty diet, and the other half ate normally.
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Baby orangutan. ©Orangutan Foundation
I admire Paul Ehrlich for his sustained warnings about human overpopulation and the environmental degradation we cause.
But sometimes, I wish he’d lighten up.
For example. Five days after I published this blog post in early February, about the discovery of a dozen new species in Columbia, Eurekalert came out with a press release that read like a wet blanket:
No joy in discoveries of new mammal species — only a warning for humanity, Paul Ehrlich says.
And so now, as 300-plus news outlets are gleefully reporting the discovery of hundreds of previously undocumented orangutans in Indonesia, my spirits are dragged down by the realization that, according to Ehrlich, the discovery spotlights “how little we actually know about our natural capital” and “how much bigger our conservation problems are if we’re going to maintain the life-support services that we need from biodiversity.”
Sure, Ehrlich is an expert. His findings (I’ll write more below) are based in science. But I want to believe in magic. I want to believe there are plenty of animals living where we don’t see them, wise enough to stay out of our way and safe from our clumsy, damaging lives.
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The world's light pollution
The Grand Canyon has been on my mind lately, possibly because it’s the perfect time of year for backpacking down there. There are many things to love about the place. For me, one of them is the Big Dipper. I love sleeping under the stars, and opening my eyes in the still-dark morning to see the Big Dipper hovering bright and close, looking poised to dump its contents.
The nearby city of Flagstaff, where I lived for 10 years and will return someday, became the world’s first International Dark-Sky City in 2001, owing to the presence of several important observatories and the dedicated efforts of a handful of astronomers. The city government and even most of the businesses have readily complied with responsible lighting codes to protect views of the night sky for residents and astronomers alike.
The skies are pretty dark over Flagstaff; the stars are rich at night. The Grand Canyon is even more impressive that way — especially on the north side. The views after dark are as stunning and magical as those during daylight.
But even those skies aren’t as good as they could be, because light pollution from cities up to 200 miles away — including Las Vegas and Phoenix — is gradually creeping in. Chad Moore, a dark skies advocate who works for the National Park Service in Denver, has spent nearly a decade documenting the skies over 55 of the nation’s parks, which are usually the best places to see the stars.
Parts of rare parks — Capitol Reef, Great Basin and Big Bend among them — boast truly dark skies. As for my treasured memories of the skies over Grand Canyon, Moore says I’ve “never experienced how good it can be” in a place like Natural Bridges, where the night sky is truly pristine.
And he says there are reasons besides beauty to work on keeping light pollution at bay: ”In the last 10 years there has been a revolution in our understanding of animal habitat and what animals require. There are links between artificial light and cancer in humans. There’s a lot we didn’t know about.”
As it happens, there’s an upcoming opportunity for activism. The International Dark-Sky Association is hosting International Dark-Sky Week April 20–26 this year.
The rest of this post has a little more information and a handful of websites to check out …
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Maybe because I’ve never actually been stung by a scorpion, I think they’re pretty neat beasts. I like their curly, secret-weapon tails and their segmented bodies, and I like my memories of spotting them in my headlamp on a nighttime hike through the Grand Canyon.
And so, naturally, I was intrigued by a study in which the researchers went looking for scorpions by flipping rocks and shining UV lights — at a place called Evolution Canyon, to boot!
The canyon, in Israel, is a natural laboratory, say Shmuel Raz and colleagues at Israel’s University of Haifa. There, European-like and African-like habitats are separated by no more than about 300 feet (100 meters).
Scorpions could easily cross the divide to live and hunt throughout — including on the more temperate side. Raz, a doctoral candidate, and his colleagues decided to see whether they do — or whether, instead, they stay true to the hot, dry conditions where they live in most of the world.
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