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With pollinators in decline around the world, conservationists turn to traditional farmers for answers
Posted by Ensia: None Given on March 1st, 2016
Ensia: In northwestern India, the Himalaya Mountains rise sharply out of pine and cedar forests. The foothills of the Kullu Valley are blanketed with apple trees beginning to bloom. It’s a cool spring morning, and Lihat Ram, a farmer in Nashala village, shows me a small opening in a log hive propped against his house. Stout black-and-yellow native honeybees -- Apis cerana -- fly in and out.
For centuries, beehives have been part of the architecture of mountain homes here, built into the thick outside...
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Cities are finally treating water as a resource, not a nuisance
Posted by Ensia: None Given on September 2nd, 2015
Ensia: Memorial Day barbecues and parades were thwarted this year in Houston when a massive storm dumped more than 10 inches of rain in two days, creating a Waterworld of flooded freeways, cars, houses and businesses, leaving several people dead and hundreds in need of rescue.
But it was a predictable disaster. That’s because, thanks to a pro-development bent, the magnitude of stormwater runoff has increased dramatically as Houston has sprawled across 600 or so square miles of mud plain veined with rivers,...
Seven wonders of a hopeful world
Posted by Ensia: None Given on December 30th, 2013
Ensia: Seven billion people and growing. A quarter of them living in poverty. Unsustainable -- and unequal -- resource use. Landscapes vanishing, along with their nonhuman inhabitants. Global warming upending natural systems. These are tough times on planet Earth. But while sustainability remains far from a global edict, hopeful signs of progress are poking up around the world. In some places, in some cases, we are doing things right, taking steady steps toward a smarter future. Here we offer seven of them...