NewWays for Environmental and Social Change

Here are 100 steps we can all make to go greener in the coming year!
In Your Home – Conserve Energy
1. Clean or replace air filters on your air conditioning unit at least once a month.
2. If you have central air conditioning, do not close vents in unused rooms.
3. Lower the thermostat on your water heater [...]

More parks, fewer cars. The Zen-like philosophy behind Park(ing) Day — the annual event that attracts artists, urban planners and open space advocates interested in setting up ad hoc miniature parks in metered parking spaces on urban streets — appears to have hit a tipping point. What began as a quirky San Francisco-based project by [...]

SHAPLEIGH, Maine - Walk about 100 yards down a well-worn path, past wild berry bushes, and take a left into leafy growth. Just a few more feet into the green canopy, and there they are, jutting out from the earth.
“I don’t even like the sight of them here,” said Liz McMahon, a Shapleigh resident for [...]

A genetic tool used by medical researchers may also be used in a novel approach to remove harmful microbes and viruses from drinking water.

In the last oil crisis of the ’70’s, Alternet says that America pulled together and reduced their driving speeds across the country to 55 MPH to save fuel. However they continue with “Fundamental rights were at stake. How dare the government infringe on the “flow of commerce” and my right to declare my independence [...]

These days, green marketers are challenged to efficiently reach consumers and effectively impact their attitudes and behaviors. There are many reasons for this of course: consumer attitudes are still evolving, familiarity with green products is just emerging and purchase behavior is inconsistent within and across categories. As such, marketers tend to look for targetable demographic [...]

Photo by Cyan James
An experimental near-field plate is a patterned grating like surface that can focus electromagnetic waves to subwavelength resolutions

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—Researchers at the University of Michigan have focused microwaves to specks 20 times smaller than their wavelength and five times smaller than other devices have achieved.
This development could allow advances such as laptop [...]

Sprawling development can affect species composition by increasing the rate of invasion by non-native species, and decreasing the persistence of native species. Using bait transects, we identified 24 native and 18 non-native species of ants. Neither the overall number of native species nor the number of rare native species were significantly affected by the amount of development or proximity to roads, however, the number of non-native species was significantly correlated with the amount of development. Surprisingly, the number of native species and rare native species was significantly positively correlated with the number of non-native species. Areas that supported many species of native ants also supported a diverse non-native ant fauna, and the species distribution was highly nested.

Urbanization and agriculture are two of the most important threats to biodiversity worldwide. The intensities of these land-use phenomena, however, as well as levels of biodiversity itself, differ widely among regions. Thus, there is a need to develop a quick but rigorous method of identifying where high levels of human threats and biodiversity coincide. These areas are clear priorities for biodiversity conservation. In this study, we combine distribution data for eight major plant and animal taxa (comprising over 20,000 species) with remotely sensed measures of urban and agricultural land use to assess conservation priorities among 76 terrestrial ecoregions in North America. We combine the species data into overall indices of richness and endemism.