Read the full story in The Guardian.
Paying people not to cut down trees works, evidence shows – so can we really afford not to do so?
Month: August 2017
Undiscovered peatlands may be the most important thing you learn about today. Here’s why.
Read the full story in Ensia.
The fate of these carbon-hoarding habitats will play a big role in our planet’s climate future.
Atlanta’s visionary Beltline is a model for the future of urban green space
Read the full story in Ensia.
The multi-use trail system is driving economic, environmental and cultural renewal — while saving the city millions of dollars.
The wonderful reason this woman is selling bags made from retired theater backdrops
Read the full story at Upworthy.
What happens to those massive gorgeous painted theater backdrops when a show ends?
Jen Kahn who has been a stage manager on and off Broadway for years, never gave a second thought to what happened to the stage scenery when a show ended until a road trip in 2015. She and her friend wandered into a store selling bags made from old sails from sailboats when inspiration struck.
They could do the same thing with discarded theater backdrops.
Just like that Scenery Bags was born.
Many Chicago Park District Fountains Are So Contaminated With Lead That They Can’t Be Turned Off
Read the full story from WBEZ.
More than 100 Chicago Park District drinking fountains have been running nonstop for months — their on and off buttons intentionally disabled by the district.
This week, park officials revealed why. They made the move, they said, because tests showed these fountains deliver dangerously high lead-levels when they are returned to manual push-button operation. A continuous flow of water, however, reduces the lead levels substantially, officials said.
The policy comes more than a year after the district identified fountains with high lead levels, and more than a decade after it implemented efforts to cut the amount of water wasted by fountains.
100,000 pages of chemical industry secrets gathered dust in an Oregon barn for decades — until now
Read the full story in The Intercept.
For decades, some of the dirtiest, darkest secrets of the chemical industry have been kept in Carol Van Strum’s barn. Creaky, damp, and prowled by the occasional black bear, the listing, 80-year-old structure in rural Oregon housed more than 100,000 pages of documents obtained through legal discovery in lawsuits against Dow, Monsanto, the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Forest Service, the Air Force, and pulp and paper companies, among others.
As of today, those documents and others that have been collected by environmental activists will be publicly available through a project called the Poison Papers. Together, the library contains more than 200,000 pages of information and “lays out a 40-year history of deceit and collusion involving the chemical industry and the regulatory agencies that were supposed to be protecting human health and the environment,” said Peter von Stackelberg, a journalist who along with the Center for Media and Democracy and the Bioscience Resource Project helped put the collection online.
Sci-Hub’s cache of pirated papers is so big, subscription journals are doomed, data analyst suggests
Read the full story in Science.
There is no doubt that Sci-Hub, the infamous—and, according to a U.S. court, illegal—online repository of pirated research papers, is enormously popular. (See Science’s investigation last year of who is downloading papers from Sci-Hub.) But just how enormous is its repository? That is the question biodata scientist Daniel Himmelstein at the University of Pennsylvania and colleagues recently set out to answer, after an assist from Sci-Hub.
Their findings, published in a preprint on the PeerJ journal site on 20 July, indicate that Sci-Hub can instantly provide access to more than two-thirds of all scholarly articles, an amount that Himmelstein says is “even higher” than he anticipated. For research papers protected by a paywall, the study found Sci-Hub’s reach is greater still, with instant access to 85% of all papers published in subscription journals. For some major publishers, such as Elsevier, more than 97% of their catalog of journal articles is being stored on Sci-Hub’s servers—meaning they can be accessed there for free.
As cities look to get greener, lower-income residents fear gentrification
Read the full story in USA Today.
Call it the greening neighborhood conundrum. The paradox that Chicago faces with its new-ish gem to its park system is one playing out in other big cities around the U.S. that are also finding it’s difficult to add marquee park space on derelict tracks and bridges in low-income areas while also keeping housing prices in check for longtime residents.
At EPA museum, history might be in for a change
Read the full story in the Washington Post.
Scott Pruitt has repeated a particular line again and again since becoming the head of the Environmental Protection Agency.
“The future ain’t what it used to be at the EPA,” he’s fond of saying.
As it turns out, the past may not be what it once was, either.
In an obscure corner of the Ronald Reagan International Trade Building, a debate is underway about how to tell the story of the EPA’s history and mission.
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