e2 - Eye on Earth, a service of
World Watch Magazine in partnership with the
Blue Moon Fund, provides our community with a unique perspective on current events, newly released studies, and important global trends. This update service offers context to critical world events that are seemingly disparate yet often closely related, highlighting the connections between human consumption and the natural world, while telling the stories of individuals and organizations that are supporting new approaches to resource use, energy use and urban development. Eye on Earth presents the news of today with an eye towards tomorrow, illustrating how current events will shape our own future and that of generations to come.
Global warming and habitat destruction are contributing to the decline of many of the world’s species, but there is action you can take.
At a June 4 conference in Seoul, South Korea, scientists and environmental experts discussed prospects for the biologically rich Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) on the Korean Peninsula.
Farmers today can grow two to three times as much grain, fruit, and vegetables on a plot of land as they could 50 years ago, but the nutritional quality of many crops has declined, according to a new report from The Organic Center.
In January, the city of São Paulo, Brazil, enacted a ban on virtually all outdoor advertising. Billboards, neon signs, and even buses and taxis have been wiped clean of advertisements in the municipality, the world’s fourth largest.
Since 1972, the “Barefoot College” in Rajasthan, India, has been a technical resource for the “washouts, copouts, and dropouts” of rural villages around the world, as founder Bunker Roy put it in a May 2006 article in Fast Company.
In a new study, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) reports that the gap between the rich and poor in many Asian countries, particularly China, has grown significantly in recent decades as economies have boomed. The United States is struggling with the same issue as new technologies such as the Internet converge with fluid and speculative economic markets, bolstering the “super-rich,” according to The Observer.
The European Commission is developing legislation that will require minimum sustainability standards for biofuels development, European Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs said at the recent International Biofuels Conference in Brussels, Belgium, on July 5–6.
A recent traffic restriction that limited driving in China’s capital city during the four-day “Good Luck Beijing” Olympic test games initially resulted in a measurable improvement in the city’s haze, according to Beijing officials. But over the full period of the restriction, air pollution levels in fact showed a slight increase, The Washington Post reported.
If you want to do something right, then it’s not going to be simple. Unfortunately, this is a general rule of life. It’s true not only for cooking, relationships, and work, but also for understanding what “sustainable” biofuels really are.
Encroaching plantations and rampant logging are threatening populations of the pygmy elephant, a species unique to the dense tropical forests of Malaysian Borneo.
