Daily Archives: January 12, 2009

Image from Peter Siver)

Crime-fighting doesn’t typically fall within a botanist’s job description but, then again, Peter Siver is hardly your typical botanist, as Julie Wernau makes clear in her nice profile. Siver has spent his entire career studying diatoms and chrysophytes, microscopic photoautotrophs that are commonly found in oceans, lakes and other bodies of water. In the process, he has traveled around the world looking for clues about climate change events stretching back millions

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Image: Calhighspeedrail.org

Another Negative Impact of the Economic Downturn
The global economic downturn has already contributed to a major deficit at the New York MTA, lowered the value of recycled materials, and of course hurt individuals and businesses around the world. A

photo: Solvatten

Though its really not as glamorous an environmental issue as some of the others out there (no high profile wind turbines, no hockey stick graphs and Keynote slideshows) access to clean drinking water is a major problem for many of the world’s people. Now a relatively simple device called the Solvatten hopes to provide a solution to the issue. Though I’m not really sure it’s accurate to call it a solar-powered device, at least in the sense that most people would conceive it, here’s how it works:

photo: Ausra

Fred Pearce has framed his latest opinion piece in Yale Environment 360 as one about Europe fiddling around with its climate change commitment (with German Chancellor Angela Merkel as lead violin), while the US is poised to reengage with the world under the Obama administration. What it’s really about though is what the US would need to do to take that lead, and it all has to do with renewable energy. Though some of this may be recap for avid TreeHugger readers, it’s worth repeating:

:: Kick your healthy dinner routine back into gear with Braised White Beans with Chard.

:: Get the scoop on xeriscaping–what it means and why it’s important.

:: Brave a cold shower to benefit your beauty routine and your bank account

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image: EWG

Considering that the incoming Obama administration’s energy policy looks to favor second generation biofuels, wind, solar and geothermal power to a greater degree than previous policy, these statistics cited by the Environmental Working Group as much a reminder of things past as much as a warning on how not to do things in the future. Nonetheless, it is useful to, as the EWG puts it, “take a hard, clear-eyed look at

corn-based ethanol’s stranglehold on federal ren

In wrapping up TreeHugger’s trip to the Consumer Electronics Show, we wanted to review the ups and downs of the green presence at the trade show.

Read on for a recap of everything we saw at CES this year.

Rice fields in Bali, photo: edie209 via flickr

You only have to have had a cursory introduction to possible effects of global warming to have heard that rising temperatures are going to effect both water supply and crop yields. A new report indicates that by 2100 up to half of the world’s population could face food shortages, if we don’t actively work to adapt to rising temperatures. This is what the University of Washington’s David Battisti’s research discovered:

Photo of Skipper Otto by Shaun Strobel

We TreeHuggers are fans of purchasing our food from as close to the producer as possible. Up here in the great white north this means buying our free-trade organic bananas at a retailer, that probably got them from a wholesaler, who, hopefully, bought them direct from the banana farmer or farmer coop. But, with food that can be grown, raised or caught closer to home our favorite way to buy food we don’t grow ourselves is through what we’ll call community supported buying.

The most common form of this is <a href=”http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/07/csa-farms-article-