More Noteworthy
In August of last year, the Whanganui River gained its citizenship. Under New Zealand law, the third-longest river in the country will be recognized as a person “in the same way a company is, which will give it rights and interests,” according to a spokesman for the Minister of Treaty Negotiations. This is the first time a legal identity has been conferred on a single river, though in 2008...
A new documentary, directed by former journalist Pamela Sherrod Anderson, highlights the unusual case of Arthur Dixon Elementary School on the South Side of Chicago. “Usually, when you hear stories about the South Side of Chicago, they are not the kinds of stories that deal with beautiful artwork and children who are happily learning,” said Anderson in a recent interview with National Public...
When nine-year old Martha Payne began a food blog last year, chronicling the paucity of her school lunches, she was not prepared to become a social media star. Payne’s blog, entitled “NeverSeconds,” began as an innocuous school project that showed pictures of her cafeteria meals along with a “Food-o-meter” rating their healthiness on a scale of 10. Suffice it to say, not many got close to 10....
She lived in a small Ugandan village and had lost five of her nine children over the past decade. The spirit, it seemed, the very will to live, had fled her. A neighbor asked if she would be willing to join a local therapy group for depression and, with some persuasion, she agreed. Just over four months later, "the fierce, loving, strong woman she had been" returned, according to an interview...
Caterpillars might not be haute cuisine for many Americans, but a new organization in Africa is promoting them as a simple, nutritious solution to the continent’s high rate of malnutrition. Shea caterpillars are brown, wriggly worms about the size of a child’s pinky finger. They are already sold live at markets in places like Burkina Faso, a small, landlocked West African nation that has a...
Japan powered down its last nuclear reactor earlier this year to make the world’s third-largest economy nuclear free for the first time in almost half a century. The closure of the Tomari plant in northern Japan came a year after the devastating tsunami that led to the meltdown of reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. The disaster has led to a dramatic reappraisal of energy policy in Japan,...
In just over a month, a small team from San Francisco was able to reconstruct five readable documents from 10,000 scraps of paper. The U.S. Department of Defense paid out $50,000 and gained, in turn, a new method for reconstituting shredded papers.
The federal government has hosted more than 150 contests like this one—the so-called Shredder Challenge—since January 4, 2011, when President Obama...
Since the development of antiretroviral drugs in the 1990s, the battle against AIDS has largely been fought over the question of how to distribute the drugs fairly. The drugs save lives, with recent research suggesting that the risk of spreading the virus is reduced to almost nil if people infected with HIV start therapy quickly enough. Furthermore, if uninfected people living in a high-risk area...
In 2000 an Afghan family paid a trafficker to take them over the border into Pakistan and then on to Denmark or Sweden. But when the trafficker arrived, there was only one spot in the van. The family sent 12-year-old Mansour alone, believing that they would soon follow.
After a three- to four-month journey—with a month hiding beneath the floorboards of a Russian flat—Mansour arrived in...
After Mozambique’s decade-long war for independence (1964–1974) and the civil war that ended in 1992, a network of landmines remained buried in all ten of the country’s provinces. Anti-vehicle mines made roads treacherous, and the death toll in some communities was high. But today, four northern provinces have been cleared of mines, thanks, in large part, to a rat.
Detecting and removing land...
With President Obama and his Republican challengers gearing up to spend millions on their election campaigns, is there any way to defeat organized money? The answer, according to voters in Maine, is organized people. Maine Citizens for Clean Elections is an organization that supports legislation to take private money out of politics. The organization advocates the Maine Clean Election Act, a...
Eric Schwarz had an idea: to harness the experience and knowledge of trained professionals and bring it to the classroom. After graduating from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, he launched his own program: Citizen Schools. His program runs after school and brings in “citizen teachers” as volunteers to work side-by-side with students. He started with one pilot site for 63 Boston students,...
When a natural disaster strikes in the West, farmers can turn to their insurance companies for aid. In the developing world, where the dangers are often more acute, and risk of failure grim, there is no such safety net. Despite the explosion of interest by Western firms in microfinance schemes, the idea of insuring the poor has so far proved unworkable. Insurance companies have viewed the costs...
Rebecca Onie describes her mission as “bringing Google to life” for low-income people in need of services. Her Boston-based organization Health Leads recruits thousands of college students to assist low-income people in identifying and obtaining essential, non-medical services, such as food assistance, child care, job training, and fuel.
The program takes a much more holistic approach to...
When Denmark announced it was implementing the world’s first fat tax on fast food, the question became, Will other countries adopt the same measure and will it strike a blow against obesity? The fat tax aims to reduce the rate of obesity-related disease, such as diabetes and coronary heart disease, by curbing the consumption of fatty foods and beverages. The Danish government announced a charge...
In an effort to fill the gaps left by our financial institutions, many are searching for local alternatives to national currencies. Time banks are one option that promotes community self-reliance while withstanding the whims of a boom and bust economy.
Time banks are now operating in over 300 communities in 22 countries, providing individuals with the opportunity to exchange services without...
A clever, albeit brutal, goat eradication program on the Galápagos Islands is credited for successfully saving a rare population of giant tortoises from extinction.
More than 1,500 giant tortoises (Geochelone hoodensis) are now believed to populate Española, the southernmost island on the archipelago. More may soon be born on nearby Pinta Island, where scientists are also hoping to launch their...
At a time when we need visionary leaders more than ever, the loss of Ray Anderson last August was a body blow. Awakened years ago by an epiphany about the damage his carpet industry was doing to the environment, Ray dedicated the latter part of his life to proving that an international corporation could thrive while leaving zero negative impact on the biosphere. He became the archetype of a...
In Andavadoaka, a Vezo village on the western coast of Madagascar, marine ecosystems are a precious resource. Over 71 percent of Vezo people rely on fishing as their sole source of income. But local fisheries can no longer support local demand: the Vezo population doubles every 10–15 years, and higher-yield fishing techniques put ecosystems under greater pressure. “From 1980 to 2000, there were...
More than almost any other recent technology, the mobile phone has penetrated the developing world and sparked innovation. And in Kenya, where more than three-quarters of the population owns a mobile phone, it helps power the economy. This is due in large part to a revolutionary money transfer system called M-PESA.
Bank branches don’t exist in many parts of rural Kenya. So, people had to make...
Germany has committed to shutting down all of its nuclear reactors by 2022, making it the biggest industrial power to go nuclear-free. Prompted by the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan, the German government has committed to finding alternative sources for almost a quarter of its energy within the next ten years.
The move has created a challenge that some German ministers have likened in scale...
More than almost any other nation, Bangladesh is on the front lines of climate change. It’s one of the world’s poorest and most densely populated countries, and most of its lands are less than 30 feet above sea level. In recent years, storms have become more frequent and more severe, claiming the lives of thousands. Almost a third of the country is vulnerable to tidal flooding, and in 2007 two...
Green capitalism is thriving in India and nowhere more so than in the renewable-energy sector. Take the entrepreneurs behind the homegrown company Husk Power Systems. Seeing an opportunity to both do good and make money in its home state of Bihar, Husk Power helps provide electricity to a region where 85 percent of the 80 million inhabitants are not connected to the electric grid. The company...
In an effort to legitimize Liberia’s timber industry, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is putting barcodes on her nation’s trees. The barcodes will be instrumental to a deal signed in May with the European Union, Liberia’s biggest market for timber, that requires Liberian timber imported into the EU to be tracked from source to sale. Starting in 2013, European timber importers will have to prove...
With the support of President Evo Morales, Bolivia is poised to pass a national law giving nature unprecedented legal rights. According to Vice President Alvaro García Linera, the legislation will make history in its recognition that “Earth is the mother of all.” The law specifically accords eleven new rights to nature, including the right to life and to exist; the right to continue vital cycles...
Slums of cardboard boxes and metal sheeting are synonymous with many Latin American cities. In Mexico, such crude housing, often unstable and overcrowded, begins at the U.S. border and stretches across the country, sprawling along highways and around the edge of cities. Nine million more homes are needed in Mexico over the next 20 years, and the severe housing shortage is particularly felt by the...
The collapse of fisheries worldwide endangers the livelihoods and food security of tens of millions of people. These fisheries are often small and ill-suited to top-down regulatory intervention. In many cases, a “tragedy of the commons” scenario—in which each individual fisherman seeks only to maximize his own catch—leads to overfishing and collapse. But a recent article in Nature describes a...
We haven’t seen a single car for 466 kilometers. It’s November 15, 2010, and Alec Neal and I are finishing our “Solutions Revolution”—a cross-country bicycle trip filming a documentary about local communities’ solutions to the climate crisis. We’ve traveled 4,979 kilometers, over 91 days, through 13 states and 21 communities, with four bicyclists and one support-car driver. All of this to learn...
When Jessie Little Doe Baird began the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project, there was only one other example of reviving an extinct language: ancient Hebrew. But where Israel made restoring the language a national priority and had thousands of ancient texts to draw upon, Baird, a member of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe of eastern Massachusetts, had to rely on her own initiative, a seventeenth-...
At Fortune magazine, Julie Schlosser and Lee Clifford worked as writers and editors for nearly a decade. They covered philanthropists, entrepreneurs, and radical thinkers working to improve the world. “We couldn’t help but be inspired,” says the pair. In 2009 Clifford and Schlosser packed up and left Fortune to cofound Altruette, a business that sells “charm bracelets with a philanthropic twist...
Countries torn by war and conflict—think Iraq, Rwanda, or Haiti—often have little trouble attracting international assistance, but large companies willing to take risks in unstable areas are scarce. Enter Prosperity Candle (www.prosperitycandle.com), a small company that got its start in Massachusetts in 2009.
The founders of Prosperity Candle—Ted Barber, Siiri Morley, and Amber Chand—had a clear...
It’s time to change the way America gives aid. The international women’s rights organization MADRE is calling on the United States government to stop flooding African nations with its agricultural surplus and to start buying crops from local African farmers instead.
Meet Khalida Mahmoud, a 29-year-old woman whose farming family was driven into worsening poverty after the U.S. poured food aid...
Off one of Bangkok’s main streets, down a tree-lined lane, is Cabbages and Condoms (C&C), a nonprofit restaurant that serves up good food and a healthy dose of sex education. The restaurant was founded by Thailand’s “Condom King,” Mechai Viravaidya, who also heads the Population and Community Development Association. He is often said to be personally responsible for lowering the country’s...
At key moments in our history, posters have inspired, persuaded, and informed. This month, Solutions and the Canary Project are pleased to launch a series of back covers for the magazine that are drawn from Green Patriot Posters. This project is open to the public and we encourage you to submit design ideas. The best submissions will be selected to run on the back of the magazine in a full-page...
The oil bubbling beneath the 4,000-square-mile Yasuni National Park along the eastern border of Ecuador has long been a source of tension between environmentalists and those eager for economic development. The Ecuadorian government and the United Nations have recently attempted to resolve this socially and environmentally complex issue with a landmark agreement. From now on, the international...
China’s effort to pump water from the Yangtze basin to the arid and heavily populated north has been stalled for years among mounting concerns about the plan’s ecological, financial, and political impact. The city of Tianjin, a coastal port near the capital, Beijing, has instead turned to seawater desalination as an alternative to the so-called South–North Water Diversion Scheme. It’s a modest...
With the signing of Executive Order 13547 on July 19, 2010, President Obama established a new national ocean policy that calls for stewardship of the oceans and coasts. The executive order creates a National Ocean Council and directs federal agencies to “protect, maintain, and restore the health and biological diversity of ocean, coastal, and Great Lakes ecosystems and resources” in a way that...
As the director of conservation programs for the Coral Reef Alliance, I’m familiar with the arguments for weaning society off seafood. For most common sushi and sashimi varieties, truly sustainable seafood options are practically nonexistent. Tools to help consumers make informed seafood choices can be exasperatingly complicated. And even if you manage to find sustainable sushi, there’s still the...
What do the wormwood moonshiner beetle, the black scabbardfish and the elegant earthstar all have in common? Other than their fairy-tale names, these three species, along with another 97, have each been tattooed onto a different volunteer as part of the ExtInked project.
Run by the Manchester-based Ultimate Holding Company, ExtInked is a “lifetime social experiment” that began in the year marking...
In 2008, Greenpeace USA launched the Carting Away the Oceans campaign to highlight the U.S. seafood industry’s leaders and laggards in sustainability. The campaign appraises seafood retailers according to four key criteria: sourcing policy, political and corporate initiatives, transparency and labeling, and overall inventory. In three reports, Trader Joe’s was identified as the poorest performing...
“Fish need nutrients not ingredients” are the oddly prophetic words of Frederic T. Barrows, a fish nutritionist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Bozeman, Montana. By now, most ocean-conscious fish eaters have become familiar with the fact that fish farming, or aquaculture, has at its root one gargantuan flaw: the most valuable fish we cultivate are carnivores, often requiring several...
The aurochs, a giant wild ox, dominated the Eurasian landscape before humans settled the region. About ten thousand years ago, people began domesticating this formidable bovine—at six-and-a-half feet at the shoulders, it stood head and horns above its diminutive domestic descendants—and hunting out its wild ancestors. The last aurochs died in a Jaktorów Forest in Poland in 1627.
Just as early...
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations estimates that investing $30 billion annually could eradicate global hunger and meet many of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals in the third world. Two-and-a-half billion people depend directly on agriculture, including 800 million who are smallholder farmers. Seventy-five percent of the global poor currently live in rural areas...
Even without a climate bill from Congress this year, the United States can be a leader in slowing and reversing global climate change.
That’s the conclusion of the Presidential Climate Action Project (PCAP) in its latest recommendations to the Obama administration. In August, PCAP sent the White House a five-step plan for presidential climate leadership in advance of the United Nations’...
At one of Raziq Fahim’s first Youth Forums in Baluchistan, Pakistan, a young man sat in the audience, planning to detonate a suicide bomb. But as he engaged in the conversation that was taking place, he changed his mind. He realized that the participants and organizers were working to find solutions for his community. Today, the would-be suicide bomber and former militant is active in Fahim’s...
In 2000, the HealthStore Foundation built its first 11 micropharmacies in central Kenya. Today, the network has expanded to include 48 basic medical clinics and 17 micropharmacies. Over these ten years, the HealthStore Foundation has served roughly two million low-income patients in central Kenya.
The HealthStore Foundation is an example of a microfranchise, an emerging development strategy that...
Britain’s coalition government has struck down efforts to expand Heathrow Airport—one of the world’s busiest—from two runways to three. This unexpected curtailment applies as well to the smaller, nearby airports, Gatwick and Stansted.
According to a recent interview with Theresa Villiers, Britain’s minister of state for transport, the expected increase in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions was “a...
In 2005, the world passed a threshold: the United Nations estimated, that for the first time in history, more than half of the human population lived in cities. Only a century ago, four out of five people lived outside of urban areas, many of them growing their own food. This shift away from the farm has resulted in health problems: obesity and diabetes in low-income areas are largely...
New Orleans is arguably the site of America’s first large-scale battle with climate change. Around the world, people don’t believe in climate change because of scientific consensus, they believe in it because they can see it happening around them. According to the Red Cross, climate refugees currently outnumber war refugees worldwide. In the United States we have thus far been spared the brunt of...
Sanjeev Arora, a physician at the University of New Mexico and one of the few hepatitis C specialists in the state, has extended high quality medical care to New Mexico’s chronically underserved rural areas. In 2004, he created Project ECHO (Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes), a telemedicine and distance-learning program that links doctors in rural or prison clinics to disease...
When I showed up at the headquarters of the solar stove foundation Centro de Desarrollo en Energia Solar, or CEDESOL, in Cochabamba, Bolivia, there was no smoke or electric power in sight, just the smell of sizzling chicken and potatoes for our lunch in the open courtyard. A few feet away I found the source of the smell—simple-looking, brightly painted wooden boxes, lined with mirrors.
The way...
In April 2010, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced a landmark decision to create new strict water quality guidelines that would minimize valley fills at mountaintop removal sites. These guidelines are not written into law and may be overturned by a future administration, but they represent a significant victory for those who are trying to clean up the mess left behind by the coal...
The financial crisis has put stress on many government programs, from education to health care to efforts to fight poverty and climate change. One of the leading responses has been to call for further cuts in programs that are already suffering.
Earlier this year, British activists tried to reverse this trend, launching a campaign that would levy taxes on financial transactions to help offset...
James Cameron, complete with orange war paint and a spear, was in the Brazilian Amazon recently, screening his movie Avatar for the region’s indigenous leaders and pledging to help them stop the government’s proposed Belo Monte dam project. The dam would flood hundreds of square miles of Amazon, dry up a 60-mile tract of the Xingu River, and displace roughly 25,000 indigenous people. The...
The military’s war on junk food has commenced. A recent report released by Mission Readiness, a nonprofit group of more than 130 high-ranking, retired military leaders, argues that childhood obesity is a threat to national security. The study finds that an alarming 27 percent of all young Americans (ages 17–24) are simply too fat for military service. Between 1995 and 2008, 140,000 potential...
An estimated 350 million acres of forest covered the southern United States in the year 1600. Today, about 40 percent of this total acreage has been converted for agriculture or lost to suburban sprawl, mining, or clear-cutting for timber and pulpwood.
SeeSouthernForests.org, a new website created by the World Resources Institute (WRI), uses satellite images through Google Earth, along with...
Last October, the Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E) announced $151 million in funding for 37 bold energy projects. The agency was created to seed high-risk, high-reward technology companies that aim to transform how America is powered. With a total budget of $400 million, ARPA-E's stated mission is to fund projects that will reduce America's dependence on...
The development of megacities has been championed by the World Bank and some environmentalists as the most efficient way to shepherd the Earth's resources as world population increases. However, a study in the March 2010 issue of the journal Nature Geoscience argues that the drivers of tropical deforestation have shifted in the early 21st century from subsistence agriculture to the growth of...
In 2007, the U.S. military establishment placed itself at odds with the Bush administration by recognizing the link between rising greenhouse gas emissions and the threats posed to national security by climate change. The urgency espoused by the Military Advisory Board, a panel of retired military chiefs, has since become part of the rhetoric of Obama's team.
In February this year, the...
Many studies have shown that permanently closed marine protected areas conserve fish populations and fisheries, and there have been several ambitious calls to establish these areas and reserve networks in order to meet global biodiversity targets. Yet it is notoriously difficult to gain community support for permanent marine reserves, especially in areas that have been fished for generations....
Thanks to a much-anticipated new solid oxide fuel cell, Bloom Energy, a California-based tech firm, claims it could soon power America's green-energy future. Late last February, Bloom Energy unveiled its Energy Server, nicknamed the Bloom Box, a refrigerator-sized personal power plant packed with thousands of energy-producing fuel cells. After nine years of research and $400 million in...
Is algaculture—the growing of algae to produce biofuel—set to make a breakthrough in 2010?
Last year saw the first algae-powered flight, when a Continental Boeing 737-800 flew over the Gulf of Mexico with one engine running partly on algae oil. The certification process in the U.S. for a 50% algae derived aviation fuel is due to start this year, as the four leading companies in the field—...
The countries of northern Europe have agreed to build a huge network of renewables that will connect offshore wind farms in northern Scotland to solar panels in Germany to wave power and hydroelectricity in Scandinavia.
Offshore wind projects in Europe are expected to generate more than 100 gigawatts of energy, about ten percent of the continent’s demands, in coming years, roughly equivalent to...
China has announced its first carbon intensity target, which aims to slow the increase of emissions relative to economic growth by 40-45% from 2005 levels by 2020. Carbon intensity is a phrase much derided by some environmentalists who say it fails to address underlying trends in carbon emissions growth. In China’s case, this measure will still lead to an increase of about 90% in CO2 emissions if...
Costa Rica recently topped the New Economic Foundation’s Happy Planet Index, confirming what the country’s enlightened leadership has been propounding to its neighbors for years: countries with the greenest policies are usually the best places to live. Costa Rica generates 90% of its energy from renewables, and Costa Rican law requires national development plans to factor in sustainability, which...
Playpower.org aims to introduce the world’s cheapest computer programs to the poor by utilizing the technology of old 8 bit computers. The Apple II computer, which had its heyday in the 1970s in the West, has lived on in the developing world, where its technology is now open source and easy to manufacture. As a result, computers can be sold for as little as $12.
Many of these systems are...
More than half of the world’s coral reefs are under direct threat from human activities. Growth rates on some reefs have fallen by fourteen percent since the 1990s. Many scientists are concerned that global warming and ocean acidification—carbon emissions can destroy corals by dissolving their calcium carbonate structure—may doom the entire reef system before the end of the century.
In a last...
Waste has become a lot more valuable to the largest processor of fresh-cut onions in the United States. California-based onion processor Gills Onions used to discard roughly 300,000 pounds of onion waste—inedible skins, tops, and tails—each day, but now this waste is being converted into a biogas that helps power the plant. The owners of Gills Onions are hoping their new Advanced Energy Recovery...
The Optimum Population Trust, based in the UK, has proposed a radical method to tackle climate change. The trust recently compared the costs of six carbon-reducing measures. To save a ton of CO2 requires an investment of $131 in electric-vehicle technology, $51 in solar energy, and $18 in wind. It takes $57 to capture and store a ton of carbon from coal and $13 to save enough trees. The...
Vancouver, Canada. The organizing committee for the Vancouver Olympics is making a bold green statement with the 2010 Games. The committee has gone to great lengths to prioritize environmental sustainability, beginning with an ambitious carbon-offset scheme.
According to estimates calculated by the Centre for Sustainability and Social Innovation, 268,000 tons of carbon emissions will be offset...
In the Sudan, decades of war and unrest, intensified by the most recent conflict in Darfur, have created the world's largest population of internally displaced persons (IDPs). Homes for Sudan, a new non-profit based in Boston, has a plan to help Sudanese refugees rebuild their villages. Working with local Sudanese universities and NGOs, Homes for Sudan is teaching IDPs the necessary skills to...
It used to be that the only exports of the Mamak Landfill in Ankara, Turkey were the powerful stench of rotting garbage and the foul liquid runoff that seeped into underground waters. But today, the landfill has cleaned up its act and is cranking out approximately 340 GWh of electricity per year that can be plugged into Turkey's national grid. As part of its Renewable Energy Project in Turkey,...
WildlifeDirect, a nonprofit led by Richard Leakey, is using the internet to create a global, conservation-driven community. Using a similar approach to Kiva.org, a popular micro-financing website, WildlifeDirect allows individual donors to learn about conservation projects taking place around the world, to communicate directly with conservationists working in the field, and to see how their...
Women in the small village of Tacarigua de la laguna in Venezuela are turning to recycling to earn a living. Tacarigua is a long coastal lagoon covering 9,200 hectares along Venezuela's Caribbean coast, a three-hour drive east of Caracas. The lagoon has areas where freshwater meets saltwater, but most of it is separated from the sea by a sandy strip 28 kilometers long and about 300 meters wide....
Solar power has been, ironically, slow to catch on in the sunshine state.
But developers of a new city aim to catapult Florida to the forefront of solar innovation. Babcock Ranch, a new housing and commercial development on a swath of rich swampland outside Fort Myers, promises to be the world’s first city to be powered only by solar energy. Residents will rely for power on a 75 megawatt, $300...
We can stop genocide, so says a new study on preventing atrocities from the Genocide Prevention Task Force chaired by Madeline Albright, former Secretary of State and Co-chair of the group. The study calls for creating an inter-agency "atrocities prevention center" with $250 million in new funds for crisis prevention and response, with a portion of this available for urgent activities to prevent...
Travel through a village in Africa, and likely as not you’ll see multicolored trash bags twisting through the scrub, like birds signaling for mates. Plastic bags have taken over the continent, caught in thorn trees, blocking sewers, clogging streams. Not in Rwanda. The government passed a law in 2004 banning plastic bags throughout the country. It’s not just enforced in markets: after you...
Navigating war zones has never been easy for aid workers and UN agencies. As the fighting earlier this year in Gaza has shown, streets are demolished, new thoroughfares run through old houses, and new military check-points provide a constantly changing city grid. To solve that problem, a new NGO called OpenStreetMap is seeking to provide a new, online map resource for humanitarian efforts in Gaza...
As South Africa battles one of the largest HIV/AIDS epidemics in the world, a group of healthcare workers and innovators is deploying a powerful new weapon in the fight: the cell phone. By sending out approximately 1 million HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis text messages each day to the personal cell phones of the general public, the initiative aims to overcome the widespread stigma that prevents...
Computers can't match humans (yet) when it comes to such tasks as describing the contents of a picture, assessing the quality of Web search results, or transcribing and translating languages. Using human expertise to solve problems that computers struggle with is a growing business: Google lets customers refine its search results, and Amazon uses a system called the Mechanical Turk to outsource...
More than 350,000 small-scale farmers in Africa and Central America will soon be selling produce to the UN in an initiative that could transform the way food aid is purchased.
Under a new five-year $76m (£41m) pilot project, the UN's World Food Programme said it would buy surplus crops from low-income farmers in 21 countries to help boost fragile economies. The food will be used for regional...
In its own version of the FBI's most-wanted list and the first such program to focus on environmental crimes, the Environmental Protection Agency has developed a website featuring a roster of 23 fugitives the government wants the public's help in tracking down.
These fugitives have allegedly assaulted nature by such acts as smuggling illegal ozone-depleting chemicals or dumping hazardous waste...
“Natural communities and ecosystems possess the unalienable right to exist, flourish, and evolve.” So begins Article 1 of the new Ecuadorian Constitution, approved by popular referendum in September 2008. Rather than regulating how much harm can be done to the environment--the traditional way of governing the amount of pollution or development that is acceptable--Ecuador’s constitution...
How can we measure a nation's well being? Most countries currently use the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) – the sum of all economic activity or total market value – as an overall wellness indicator. Therefore, when the economy is in good health, factors such as oil spills, natural disasters, and high cancer rates get ignored.
In recent years, the Australian Treasury developed a "well-being...
The most popular criticism slung at the proponents of organic food is that of elitism. Titles like "locally grown," "grass-fed," "free-range," and "pesticide free" all increase prices, making food less affordable for low-income families. However, a growing number of farmers' markets are teaming up with state governments to enable poor families to use food stamps at growers' markets, increasing...
