Environment

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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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 of crops to pests, and losses of native biodiversity that ...
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by Bill Schlesinger Most studies predicting changes in species distribution with global warming focus on species that may move into areas that are presently too cold for them—for example, the northward expansion of the range of birds on continents and ...
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by Bill Schlesinger "Don’t it always seem to goThat you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone" Joni Mitchell, Big Yellow Taxi, 1970 Humans have occupied all continents of the Earth since the end of the last ice age, ...
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by Bill Schlesinger Normally, we think of a legacy as a financial contribution or a policy that has a lasting impact on an institution. Alternatively, we may hear that a youngster applying to a certain college is likely to be ...
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