Ohio Wesleyan University, Department of Environment & Sustainability
In a world-first, the extent of human development in oceans has been mapped. An area totalling approximately 30,000 square kilometresâthe equivalent of 0.008 percent of the oceanâhas been modified by human construction.
The extent of oceanmodified by human construction is, proportion-wise, comparable to the extent of urbanised land, and greater than the global area of some natural marine habitats, such as mangrove forests and seagrass beds.
Source: Phys.org News
Ever since psychologists started measuring intelligence, including the academic skills measured by IQ tests and their proxies, they have known that intelligence is not really your ability to solve obscure multiple-choice problems with largely trivial content that will have no impact on your future life whatsoever. Instead, intelligence is the ability to adapt to the environment: adaptive intelligence.
Organisms that donât adapt die.
Intelligence is not just about an inert ability to take tests; it is about the active deployment of that ability to solve problems of life.
In my in-press book, Adaptive Intelligence, I argue that all us, including colleges and universities, ought to focus not on producing test takers who are content to see the world go to hell in a handbasket so long as they get their degrees and make their money. Look around us. Itâs not working! Instead, we need to develop and assess studentsâ adaptive skills in and willingness to make the world a better place. If not now, when?
Source:Â COVID-19 Has Taught Us What Intelligence Really Is (Inside Higher Ed)
Something as simple as black paint could be the key to reducing the number of birds that are killed each year by wind turbines. According to a study conducted at a wind farm on the Norwegian archipelago of Smøla, changing the color of a single blade on a turbine from white to black resulted in a 70-percent drop in the number of bird deaths.
..in 2013, each of the four turbines in the test group had a single blade painted black. In the three years that followed, only six birds were found dead due to striking their turbine blades. By comparison, 18 bird deaths were recorded by the four control wind turbinesâa 71.9-percent reduction in the annual fatality rate.
Source: ArsTechnica
The National Science Foundation is awarding Ohio Wesleyan University a one-year, $86,735 grant to oversee the creation of online teaching tools that advance field ecology and data science.
Laurel J. Anderson, Ph.D., OWUâs Morris Family Professor of Natural Sciences, is the principal investigator on the federal grant. She also is president of the Board of Directors for the Ecological Research as Education Network (EREN), a consortium of colleges and universities that will work together to create the new teaching tools. Dr. Anderson will partner with Dr. Tim McCay from Colgate University to administer the project.
âThe pandemic has created an urgent need to reimagine our teaching of field ecology, which is usually done with in-person field trips,â said Dr. Anderson, who helped to found EREN in 2010.
âHowever, field ecologists also use computer technology extensively to explore natural patterns at large scales,â she continued. âThese projects allow us to meet our need to socially distance and have students collecting data wherever they happen to be. Then, we use online tools and datasets to see how their data fits into large-scale patterns.â
In a world first, University of Hong Kong marine institute scientists lay clay tiles in marine park where coral was wiped out in twin ecological catastrophes
Seeded with living corals, the tiles quickly increased biodiversity. If found to work, they could transform reefs damaged by pollution, fishing and bleaching
Source:Â Tiles to restore corals, designed and 3D printed in Hong Kong, may be key to saving the worldâs threatened reefs (South China Morning Post)
Source:
“The public wants a Green New Deal. The public wants green stimulus. The public wants to address inequality.”
Amid persistent calls for a green and just recovery from the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and nationwide protests against systemic racism and injustice, researchers on Friday detailed recent studies showing “policy packages that address the climate crisis alongside income inequality, racial injustice, and the economic crisis are more popular among voters.”
There probably is more carbon dioxide in the air now than at anytime in 3 million years
The coronavirus pandemicâs economic downturn may have set off a sudden plunge in global greenhouse gas emissions, but another crucial metric for determining the severity of global warming â the amount of greenhouse gases actually in the air â just hit a record high.
According to readings from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the amount of CO2 in the air in May 2020 hit an average of slightly greater than 417 parts per million (ppm). This is the highest monthly average value ever recorded, and is up from 414.7 ppm in May of last year.
Source: Keeping Seeds In Our Hands: The Rise of Seed Activism (The Journal of Peasant Studies)
Every seed makes a political statement.
â Moudgil (2017)
Semantic innovations like seed commons, peasant seeds and seed sovereignty are a powerful expression of what may be termed as seed activism. In this opening paper of the JPS Special Forum on Seed Activism, we explore the surge of mobilizations the world over in response to processes of seed enclosures and loss of agrobiodiversity. A historical overview of the evolution of seed activism over the past three decades traces a paradigm shift from farmersâ rights to seed sovereignty. Some of the main threats to peasant seed systems â from seed and intellectual property laws to biopiracy, corporate concentration and new genome editing technologies â are analyzed along with strategies by peasants and other activists to counter these developments.
Search “Seed Activism” on Google
Guerrilla gardening is the act of gardening on land that the gardeners do not have the legal rights to cultivate, such as abandoned sites, areas that are not being cared for, or private property. (source)
