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.
Data centers—large facilities that house electronic equipment to run websites, monitor Internet traffic, and store and process data—can consume more than 40 times the energy of similarly sized office spaces, according to a new report from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Any guitar lover knows that quality wood is a vital component to a great instrument. But not all are aware that the wood used to make most guitars comes from rare, ancient, and disappearing forests.
In Native American tradition, “counting coup” is an act of bravery whereby one combatant touches his enemy without injuring the enemy or himself. Intertribal COUP (Council On Utility Policy), a coalition that promotes wind power development on U.S. tribal lands, is therefore aptly named, according to the group’s president Patrick Spears, a Lower Brule Sioux.
Africa can use the biofuels boom to achieve the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and fight poverty, said participants at Africa’s first high-level biofuels seminar in Ethiopia last month.
A renewable energy project in the North Kolar district of Karnataka, South India, has helped villagers adopt clean energy solutions while also generating emissions “credits” that can be sold on the international carbon market.
Since 1991, a unique program has helped golf lovers around the world be even more “green.”
News last month that researchers at Boston University had discovered a huge underground aquifer in western Sudan’s Darfur region set off feverish speculations. Would development of this vast water resource help quell the vicious conflict raging in one of the world’s most arid regions?
A retrofit kit initially designed to reduce the emissions of snowmobiles is now being applied to the ubiquitous two-stroke motorcycle taxis in Philippine cities.
The same violence that has killed thousands of people in South Asia’s disputed Kashmir region is responsible for a 30 to 60 percent increase in the population of endangered Asiatic black bears, reports Toronto’s Globe and Mail.
Consumption of biodiesel, ethanol, and other biofuels accounted for 1.8 percent of the European Union’s transportation energy in 2006, up from just 1 percent in 2005, according to the most recent Biofuels Barometer, a publication supported by the European Commission.
