Efforts to improve the situation of indigenous peoples through restoration of the environment is one of the most intriguing stories to emerge from travel. One of the organizations doing important work in this field, the Environmental Educational Media Project, produced the documentary Hope In A Changing Climate, which promotes the enormous potential of restoration. Screened at the COP 15 climate change summit in Copenhagen last December and subsequently aired by the BBC, the film follows soil scientist John D. Liu, who for the past 15 years has been documenting changes on China’s remote Loess Plateau, where the local people have been transforming a barren plateau into a green and fertile one, reducing the effect of climate change. Liu explains:

“On the plateau, researchers realized that progressive degradation of the environment trapped the local population into a life of subsistence farming. It’s a process that has occurred across the globe, where poor agricultural communities find themselves overusing their land in order to survive, depleting its fertility and further impoverishing themselves. One thing that became apparent early on is the connection between damaged environments and human poverty. In many parts of the world there’s been a vicious cycle: continuous use of the land has led to subsistence agriculture and generation by generation, this has further degraded the soils.”

Shot on location in China, Rwanda and Ethiopia, Hope in a Changing Climate is a truly uplifting story of how ecosystem restoration helps stabilize climate, reduce poverty, and support sustainable agriculture.

Often, my strong urge to travel has to do with seeing something before it disappears. For years I felt that way about going to Africa; I wanted to go on safari before it was too late to see the animals in the wild. I was painfully aware that in many areas of Africa where ecological consciousness is non-existent, poaching and loss of habitat have resulted in animals being added to the endangered species list, if not brought to the brink of extinction. Thus I was delighted last year to discover that the animal populations in Africa seemed to be thriving, at least in the areas where I visited.

I feel the same way about the shrinking rain forests around the globe. Researchers now tell us with certainty that climate zones will shift and some climates will disappear completely by 2100. Tropical highlands and polar regions may be the first to disappear, and large swaths of the tropics and subtropics will reach even hotter temperatures. I sometimes feel desperate to visit the great rain forests of the world before they are gone and so I was most interested to read about a project of the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Sciences at Cornell University that is attempting to restore the tropical rain forest ecosystems in Costa Rica.

Incredible biodiversity exists just ten short years after restoring a tropical rainforest on a parcel of played-out pasture land in Costa Rica

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s the home stretch for me. I’ve sold my home on the Outer Banks of North Carolina and it’s due to close this coming Friday. Although all the big items have already been packed up and placed in storage, there was still food in the house, since I occasionally returned to the Outer Banks during the 18 months it was listed for sale. Yesterday I decided it was time to tackle the pantry and refrigerator. I sorted the food into three groups:

1. Items that I would take back to Sarasota with me, like rice and dried beans
2. Non-perishable items that were still good but that I did not want to bring to Sarasota (these were destined for the local food bank)
3. Perishable items and non-perishable items that are out-of-date and must be thrown out

When I finished sorting, I grabbed a big black plastic trash bag and began loading it up with all the stuff to be thrown away. It was an uncomplicated task that let my mind wander, and I began thinking about a video I had watched that very morning at the coffee shop. It was a feature about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an area of the ocean twice the size of Texas that is overloaded with floating trash. Located 500 miles off the coast of California, midway between the U.S. and Japan, this ocean patch is known as the north Pacific gyre, more commonly called the horse latitudes by sailors, who avoided the area at all costs for fear of being becalmed.

This ocean realm is created by a huge mountain of air that is heated at the equator and then descends in a gentle clockwise rotation as it approaches the North Pole. The winds produce circular ocean currents that spiral into a center, carrying with it the debris of civilization, some of it having floated around the Pacific Rim for as long as 12 years before Read the rest of this entry »

I eat a lot of yogurt. I stick to organic brands, my favorite being Stonyfield Farm, and I have always wondered why their containers are made from #5 plastic, which is not recyclable, rather than #2 plastic, which IS recyclable. Recently, I decided to investigate and discovered that the issue is not as simple as I thought. Aware that the manufacturing of million of cups annually has an enormous impact on the environment, Stonyfield Farm began examining their packaging issues in the mid-80′s. Although they initially assumed hat the most important criteria was recyclability, Stonyfield discovered that it is just one of the issues that must be considered when looking at the impact of packaging on our environment.

Stonyfield compared the various packaging options available to them, using a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), a tool that determines the cradle-to-grave environmental impact of a product from its manufacture and use, through its re-use, recycling and/or disposal. After examining their options (including glass, poly-coated paper, and plastic), they chose Read the rest of this entry »