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Wind Offers a Healthy Way to Generate Power | David Suzuki
Wind Offers a Healthy Way to Generate Power | David Suzuki.
There’s no free ride when it comes to generating energy. Even the cleanest sources have environmental consequences. Materials for all power-generating facilities have to be obtained and transported, and infrastructure must be built, maintained and eventually decommissioned. Wind turbines take up space and can harm wildlife. Hydro floods agricultural land and alters water cycles.
That’s why conservation is the best way to reduce energy-consumption impacts. Reductions in energy use and investment in energy-efficiency technologies are so significant that the International Energy Agency refers to conservation as the “first fuel“.
No matter how good we get at conserving, though, we’ll always need energy, so we must find ways to employ the least damaging technologies and reduce negative effects. We know the world’s preferred, and currently cheapest, method to generate power — burning fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas — is the most destructive, causing pollution, global warming and massive environmental damage during extraction, transport, refining and use. And supplies are becoming more difficult to obtain and will eventually run out.
In contrast, wind power doesn’t create pollution or global warming emissions, is affordable and will never run out. Improvements to power-generation capacity, efficiency and affordability will continue to boost its importance in the energy mix. But we must ensure turbines are installed in locations and using methods that reduce negative impacts on humans and wildlife.
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Sustainability requires that we learn to embrace change, not fight it | Ensia
Sustainability requires that we learn to embrace change, not fight it | Ensia.
December 3, 2014 — Limits to growth are a fundamental and widely accepted principle of sustainability. You might even call them the first law of sustainability. Nevertheless, as ecological economist Richard Norgaard first noted, limits make a terrible metaphor for sustainability. They don’t inspire vision; they only require restraint. They highlight what we can’t do — catch more than x fish or cut down more than y trees per year — but offer nothing in terms of how we might organize our lives such that sustainability isn’t a constant struggle. Limits are unavoidable, and their recognition is requisite to sustainability, but I believe that if people and communities are to develop new and transformative ways of living sustainably they need a metaphor that inspires not just restraint but creativity and innovation. The basis for such a vision, I submit, is found in a second basic principle of sustainability, one that requires us to allow, and even embrace, change. I call this principle the conservation of change, and propose it as the second law of sustainability.
The concept of limits derives from natural law — the first law of thermodynamics, also known as the conservation of energy. There is also a second law of thermodynamics, and whereas the first law is concerned with physical phenomena, the second law is organizational. Given that sustainability is fundamentally an organizational question — about how we organize our systems for resource use such that they can be sustained — the second law of thermodynamics is particularly relevant.
The second law of thermodynamics states all systems move toward maximum entropy, which is often described as potential or disorder. At first blush this law would seem to relegate the notion of sustainability to wishful thinking: If all systems move toward lower organizational complexity, then stability in any complex natural system, whether of a population or ecosystem or biome, would be short-lived. Yet, through cycles, nature has developed a solution to this tendency toward disorder. Cycles are the mechanism by which high levels of biological and ecological organization are sustained despite the fact that the matter and energy therein are inclined toward lower degrees of organization.
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A Conservationist Sees Signs of Hope for the World’s Rainforests by Rhett Butler: Yale Environment 360
After decades of sobering news, a prominent conservationist says he is finally finding reason to be optimistic about the future of tropical forests. Consumer pressure on international corporations and new monitoring technology, he says, are helping turn the tide in efforts to save forests from Brazil to Indonesia.
In the mid-1990s I visited a magnificent tract of lowland rainforest in Malaysian Borneo. Some of my fondest memories are from that forest: hiking under the towering trees, wading in the crystal-clear streams, and delighting in its spectacular wildlife, including hornbills and endangered orangutans. But a few months after my visit, those trees were torn down, and the forest was obliterated. Today that area is an oil palm plantation.
The destruction of that forest set me on an odyssey that led to the creation of Mongabay.com, which has become a popular and influential website that closely tracks trends in the world’s tropical forests. For a decade-and-a-half, I have devoted tens of thousands of hours to the cause of protecting forests, engaging with the world’s leading forest experts and visiting scores of forests around the world. During that time, I’ve continued to witness incredible destruction, and there has been reason for despair. But lately — for the first time, really — I’ve started seeing cause for optimism about future of forests.
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Electric Power Rights of Way: A New Frontier for Conservation by Richard Conniff: Yale Environment 360
Often mowed and doused with herbicides, power transmission lines have long been a bane for environmentalists. But that’s changing, as some utilities are starting to manage these areas as potentially valuable corridors for threatened wildlife.
Nobody loves electrical power transmission lines. They typically bulldoze across the countryside like a clearcut, 150 feet wide and scores or hundreds
of miles long, in a straight line that defies everything we know about nature. They’re commonly criticized for fragmenting forests and other natural habitats and for causing collisions and electrocutions for some birds. Power lines also have raised the specter, in the minds of anxious neighbors, of illnesses induced by electromagnetic fields.
So it’s a little startling to hear wildlife biologists proposing that properly managed transmission lines, and even natural gas and oil pipeline rights-of-way, could be the last best hope for many birds, pollinators, and other species that are otherwise dramatically declining.
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