by Bill Schlesinger "Up, Up and Away, my beautiful, my beautiful balloon." The Fifth Dimension, 1967 Hydrogen, like helium, is lighter than air. You can fill balloons with hydrogen, and…
"If you want to succeed you should strike out on new paths, rather than travel the worn paths of accepted success." John D. Rockefeller by Bill Schlesinger Since the advent…
by Bill Schlesinger And you tell me over and over and over again, my friendAh, you don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction P.F. Sloan, 1964 In these months after…
Plastic waste mountain by Bill Schlesinger With increasing frequency, we hear of the accumulation of plastic waste and its persistence in the global environment. This is not a newly emerging…
by Bill Schlesinger A lot of folks wonder why I am not a big advocate of soil carbon sequestration to mitigate climate change. After all, it is widely recognized (and…
by Bill Schlesinger Those of us who collected butterflies as kids know that their populations are much lower now than in the 1950s. Our data are only memories, now reinforced…
by Bill Schlesinger (Coauthor of this guest blog, Charles Cannon is Director of the Center for Tree Science at the Morton Arboretum, Lisle, Illinois.) Ecologists and conservation biologists often characterize…
by Bill Schlesinger Each day we breathe more than 10 cubic meters of air—more if we are exercising—so it stands to reason that stuff in the air can enter our…
by Bill Schlesinger In the pursuit of food security and abundance for the world’s rising population, it seems we are fouling our own nest. Pesticides are big business. One recent…
by Bill Schlesinger Since the first arrival of a rat by ship, we’ve known that invasions of alien species extract huge economic costs to society—seen in higher medical expenses, losses…