Scientist Ian Bell measures a Hawksbill Turtle off the Great Barrier Reef. Photo credit: Ian Bell. This is the first post from guest contributor and Planet Green NGO partner EarthWatch Institute. In 1971, we opened our doors to scientists of all disciplines and nationalities who needed support to understand the conditions of life on Earth. We studied rocks and stars, plants and animals, ancient peoples and their ruins, their relationships and interdependencies. Earthwatch is the world's largest environmental volu...

In a baffling shift of climate, Hell has frozen over. The flash freeze wasn’t precipitated by a crumbling ice shelf or rising sea—or maybe it was. Rupert Murdoch, the founder and CEO of News Corporation, has decided to render his global conglomerate carbon neutral, as well as educate the public and green up the many tendrils of his enormous news business. Murdoch’s media empire contains such brands as Fox Broadcasting, MySpace, and the Wall Street Journal. Rachel Webber is News Corp.’s Director of ...

image: NASA Every year the topic of the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico seems to pop up on TreeHugger—most recently in a report which links expanded corn production to the increasing size of the zone. New research shows that it’s not just in the Gulf that ocean dead zones are expanding but throughout the world. Dead Zones Have Doubled Every 10 Years Since 1960s According to the study, the number of marine dead zones—areas which are periodically or permanently starved of oxygen—has doubled every 10 years since the 1960s, with those...

More Cyclists Means A Need For More Awareness Now that more and more people are getting on their bikes due to high gas prices, summer weather and increased awareness of the environmental and social impacts of driving, there has also been a slight increase in traffic accidents between cyclists and motorists as inexperienced riders and angry, unaware motorists hit the roads. After improving infrastructure (by adding bike lanes,

I'm sure you're probably getting tired of hearing me drone on and on about ocean acidification (even though it arguably poses one of the greatest threats to our planet's livelihood), so I thought I'd let somebody else -- who's actually well-versed in the subject -- do the talking. Though better known for its spectacular exhibits, the Monterey Bay Aquarium also boasts a crack research institute -- the appropriately named Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) -- which has been spending the last few years studying ocean acidification. While a bit on the short side,

Reuters had an interesting piece recently on Bangladesh's thriving Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) recycling industry. The South Asian country exported more than 20,000 tons of PET flakes, the shredded version of plastic bottles, last year sorted from the 3,000 factories across the country dedicated to recycling. The industry generated about $10 million in 2007 and has grown annually at a rate of 20 percent. Once the PET bottles have been sorted and crushed, the flakes are export...

Seems the Buenos Aires government is busy with environmental control. After announcing a new garbage management plan and reaching to an agreement to take out 40 thousand billboards from the streets of Buenos Aires, it has just put to work 42 new Intelligent Monitoring Towers that, they say, will allow more information about air and noise quality in the city and therefore better environmental policies to...

With more than half of humanity now living in cities, and the built environment set to expand massively over the next few decades, the way we create our cities may be the key to achieving a sustainable future. By recognizing that the city block is to the built environment what the cell is to the human body, San Francisco-based Urban Re:Vision aims to revolutionize the way we plan, build and experience our cities. Founded in 2006, Urban Re:Vision, in association with Architecture for Humanity a...