Environment

by Bill Schlesinger The past week brought a mixed bag of news to my mailbox. The world’s population was estimated to have passed 8 billion folks, each with the desire to be a consumer at the level of Western economies ...
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by Bill Schlesinger (Title from Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer, circa 1385 Most of the human body that is not bone is composed of protein, each built with an array of amino acids that contain nitrogen. Reflecting the homogenization of our ...
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by Bill Schlesinger It is widely acknowledged that consumption of meat, particularly beef, has major negative impacts to the environment. On the other side of the grocery aisle, fruits and vegetables are thought to have much lesser impact, provided they ...
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Bill and mansion by Bill Schlesinger America is the land of the big—Big Houses, Big Cars, Big Macs, and Big Dreams. The average new house in the U.S. has 1000 square feet (93 m2) per occupant. Other world citizens get ...
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by Bill Schlesinger Extractive industries, such as mining, are inherently unsustainable, because the crust of the Earth contains only a finite supply of metals. In my younger days of field work in the Southwest, I was appalled at the environmental ...
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by Bill Schlesinger As early as the 1960s, when we saw a proliferation of plastic waste in landfills and unsightly plastic cups along the roadside, we realized that some of these products were never going to break down. Less obvious ...
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Emerald ash borer by Bill Schlesinger Even a century ago, the arrival of pests and pathogens from Europe wreaked havoc on American elm and chestnut trees, leading to their near extinction in many areas of the eastern forests. In the ...
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by Bill Schlesinger Numerous studies link per capita energy consumption to the greater health and well-being of people in various nations worldwide. Question is: does this correlation extend continuously from impoverished nations to well-developed nations, whose primary energy consumption may ...
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by Bill Schlesinger Each time an accidental spill coats thousands of seabirds with oil, worldwide opinion is galvanized against off-shore oil production. Witness the wreck of the Exxon Valdez tanker in Alaska and British Petroleum’s blowout at its Deepwater Horizon ...
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by Bill Schlesinger When trees are used for biomass energy, they are first pelleted, then dried and shipped to a power plant—all energy consuming activities. When burned, all the carbon they contain is emitted to the atmosphere, essentially immediately. The ...
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