Environment

The Thanksgiving Feast Python for bacon by Bill Schlesinger With the arrival of the pilgrims in 1620, the invasion of exotic species in North America began in earnest—annual grasses in the west, meadow weeds in the east, starlings and house ...
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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 they will rise and float away.  Hydrogen is in vogue ...
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"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 of the Industrial Revolution, we’ve added about 950 billion metric ...
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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 our withdrawal from Afghanistan, U.S. citizens may feel remote from ...
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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 environmental problem; it began 70 years ago with the proliferation ...
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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 I thoroughly agree) that soils with lots of organic matter ...
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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 formal, long-term studies of insect populations in several regions ...
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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 biodiversity as the number of species found per unit area ...
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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 body in large quantities.  One of the pollutants of current ...
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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 report finds that 64% of agricultural land worldwide is contaminated ...
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