The Global Ecology Blog

The Future by Al Gore

Al Gore's new book explores how to manage simultaneous revolutions in biology, economics and technology.

Amazing Numbers

Statistics can be deceiving and ordinarily should be taken with a grain of salt, but these recent numbers are pretty amazing.

Did you know that 1.2 Billion tons of food - as much as 50% of the world's total production - actually gets thrown away?  This is according to a report by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.  At the same time, 748,465 pounds of food (374.23 tons) were collected by Wells Fargo for their Dump Hunger food donation campaign, equivalent to nearly 10 trucks and exceeding the campaign goal by 448,465 pounds.

Did you know that there were 349 U.S. military suicides in 2012?  That number is more than the 295 troops killed in combat in Afghanistan during the same year.

Americans paid an estimated $6 Billion in airline fees--not airline tickets--in 2012!

34,435 people actually signed a petition asking the U.S. government to build a national defense "Death Star."  Paul Shawcross, chief of the Science and Space Branch of the White House Budget Office, rejected the petition stating: "The Administration does not support blowing up planets."

How bad is China's air? According to studies, there were 8,500 premature deaths in four Chinese cities in 2012 due to air pollution.  Air quality readings from the U.S. embassy in Beijing on January 12, 2013 measured

A World Without Toilet Paper?

Common items — from business cards to gasoline — could become obsolete in the next half-century

In the next half-century many fixtures of everyday life will go the way of the gramophone, labeled "quaint" and relegated to museums — if not the trash. In 50 years, what do futurists predict will make Americans wax nostalgic?

The Radium Girls

Radium was widely used in self-luminous clock and watch hands, until too many watch factory workers had died of it. This antique watch is still quite radioactive, and will stay that way for thousands of years.  This is the gut-wrenching story of the girls who made the watch faces, and the rise and fall of radium, the so-called "golden element."   It remains a cautionary tale of radioactive elements, the slow recognition of their danger, and the risks of scientific over-confidence – that rings remarkably true today.

The story begins back in 1898,when scientists in France had announced a startling discovery,