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Moving photos show climate change destroying the nomadic way of life in Mongolia
Posted by Fast Company: None Given on March 9th, 2015
Fast Company: Just another sad casualty of environmental collapse: These before-and-after shots show how deserts are taking over the pastures where animals once grazed.
Up to a third of Mongolians live as nomads, but that lifestyle is increasingly under threat. Rampant desertification is destroying the grassland where nomads graze their animals, meaning many are being forced to move to cities, where they don't belong.
"Nomadic life has been central to traditional Mongolian culture throughout history," says...
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Here’s what will happen this century if don’t do anything about climate change
Posted by Fast Company: None Given on December 12th, 2014
Fast Company: Basically, a lot of death, both human and otherwise.
In case you haven't had a chance to read through the UN's huge recent report on climate change--over 2,000 pages long, and based on 9,200 peer-reviewed studies--a new interactive site called Global Weirding helps summarize how the planet may change over the rest of the century.
"The IPCC report is the most important report on climate change ever made--but it's also very, very inaccessible," says Tiina Ruohonen from CICERO, a Norway-based...
Live in a heavily fracked area? Watch out for STDs
Posted by Fast Company: None Given on September 29th, 2013
Fast Company: Just in case news of the potential environmental damage didn't scare you, anti-fracking advocates say you should be concerned about your naughty bits.
In 1850, near the beginning of the California Gold Rush, the female population was perilously low in Northern California. In mining counties, they made up less than 2% of overall inhabitants. According to Sierra Foothills Magazine, one man wrote at the time: "Got nearer to a woman this evening than I have been in six months. Came near fainting."...
The greenest office building in the world is about to open in Seattle
Posted by Fast Company: None Given on January 12th, 2013
Fast Company: Seattle’s Bullitt Center is being heralded as the greenest, most energy-efficient commercial office building in the world. It’s not that the six-story, 50,000-square-foot building is utilizing never-before-seen technology. But it’s combining a lot of different existing technologies and methods to create a structure that’s a showpiece for green design--and a model for others to follow.
A project of the Bullitt Foundation, a Seattle-based sustainability advocacy group, the Bullitt Center has an...
As people crowd into cities, they’re becoming more and more vulnerable
Posted by Fast Company: None Given on December 4th, 2012
Fast Company: It’s a troubling fact that more people are moving to cities just as those cities face bigger environmental dangers. Half the world already lives in a city, and by 2050, 75% of us will. In many cases, that growth is exacerbating the risks: for example, increasing carbon emissions while leaving infrastructure less able to cope with shocks such as flooding. Cities already use up to 80% of all the energy on the planet, and produce 75% of emissions, and those percentages are set to grow as the expansion...
Photographer James Balog traces glacial decay in his latest documentary, “Chasing Ice.”
Posted by Fast Company: None Given on October 18th, 2012
Fast Company: When James Balog set out to document decaying glaciers via time-lapse photography, he first had to build a camera that could withstand hurricane winds and temperatures of 40 degrees below zero. Balog talks us through the labor-intensive project--35 cameras were placed at 18 glaciers for more than four years--the results of which can be seen in this month’s documentary Chasing Ice.
Why build your own equipment?
I entered this project thinking I'd be able to buy this equipment off the shelf,...