© Team Cora We all have heard of groups, websites and apps that help people swap their stuff or give their old items to folks who want them. They're all great ways to keep things out of landfill and reduce how much we consume. But Team CORA wants to go one step more and connect you with people who need your old junk as raw material for new projects, literally transforming your trash into treasure. © Team CORA "We believe that if there's something you need, chances are it's already hidden in y...

"The Old Plantation", Unidentified Artist (c. 1790-1800)/Public Domain Plus, the natural gas glut means many new wells will be uneconomical; over 4 gigawatts of US coal power plants are set to close or are being hung-up in court; and, nations should all pledge to double renewable energy at the Rio+20 conference in June. Here are the details: EU Climate Head Urges Doubling of Renewable Energy at Rio+20With a bit over five months to go until the Rio+20 environmental summit in Brazil, statements ...

muffet/CC BY 3.0 MIT researcher Andreas Mershin is digging in to a new way to create cheap, effective solar panels. Building off work started by Shuguang Zhang of MIT?s Center for Biomedical Engineering, Mershin is working on how to take the molecules responsible for photosynthesis in plants (PS-I) and put them to work on solar panels, and to do so in such a way that any lab anywhere in the world could replicate the process. MIT reports, "The new system?s efficiency is 10,000 times greater tha...

The Perennial Plate/Video screen capture It is almost a cliche that community gardens bring people together and help bridge cultural divides. But it's true. There is something about the act of gardening that emphasizes our shared heritage as human beings, even as it expresses our differences in terms of what we grow and how we eat. From the awesome urban farmers of New Orleans to a youth program bringing young farmers together across cultures, The Perennial Plate has explored the cultural benef...

© Cengage Learning Every year when I start my class teaching sustainable design at Ryerson School of Interior Design, I explain that there is no textbook for the course, because nobody has written one that is any good in a field that is changing daily. Next year I will have to qualify that; when it comes to green building, there is now. It's written by Abe Kruger and Carl Seville, AKA the Green Building Curmugeon, and it is very, very good at what it does. It is focused on the single family re...

David Sifry via Flickr CC/CC BY 2.0 Hawaii has the wonderfully ambitious goal of getting 70 percent of their energy needs from renewable sources by 2030. To meet that goal, the state will be developing lots of stable geothermal and biomass power, but they'll also be relying heavily on wind power. Hawaii has great wind power resources, but the downside is the variability of the wind. For the smaller islands especially, which currently depend on diesel-powered generators, a major downturn in wind...

USEIA/Public Domain The latest US Energy Information Agency (EIA) report demonstrates natural gas prices continue to stay below historic levels. As shown in chart form (above), the remarkably low natural gas prices of early 2012 were bolstered by balmy winter weather and increased production. As to the climate factor, USEIA reports that "Population-weighted heating degree days since November 1, 2011 are down 12% nationally from the 30-year average." Fracking, of course, is a big part of what ac...

osaMu/CC BY 2.0Warning sign on the road to the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Hard-working rescue teams helped many of the thousands of pets displaced by Japan's catastrophic earthquake and tsunami last year. But the long-term future of animals exposed to nuclear radiation during the disaster may not be very rosy. Early reports out of the area around the disabled Fukushima reactor indicate a drop in bird populations and "an immediate negative consequence of radiation for birds during the main ...

© Paul Hennon For the past hundred years, the only name for the plague killing off economically valuable yellow-cedars has been "yellow-cedar decline." The die-off has affected about 60 to 70 percent of the yellow-cedars in forests covering 600,000 acres (240,000 hectares) of the North Pacific Coastal Rainforest in Alaska and neighboring British Columbia. Yellow-cedars grow slowly, many reaching ages between 700 and 1200 years old. The wood of the yellow-cedar serves Native Alaskans for crafti...

Michael Bloomberg has big plans for how to turn New York City into a shining example of sustainable urbanism, but the more fanciful (and awesome) parts of his plans can't go forward without a solid grounding in practical information. This map should do a lot to fill the gap: It breaks down energy consumption in the Big Apple, block by block, by quantity and use. The map was produced as part of a study by Bianca Howard, a Ph.D. student in mechanical engineering at at Columbia University's School...

© Bonnie Hulkower When my friend Ziv suggested Amir?s Garden as a quiet place for a picnic or as a place to meditate, I was confused. I spent most of my teen years hiking in the Santa Monica Mountains and was surprised to find out that there was a secret garden in the middle of Los Angeles, that I didn?t know about. Today with twitter and yelp, it seemed impossible to just find out about a place that had existed for more than forty years. After visiting the garden, I was more surprised to lear...

© Heinrich Böll StiftungKebreab Demeke's sculpture/garden in Harla, Ethiopia. In many parts of Ethiopia, the clay pots long used for carrying water have been replaced with plastic jerry cans, which lighten the load of the water-toter, but often end up as trash littered across the landscape. In one village, though, the jerry cans (called "jerekinas") have found new life as a colorful, functional sculpture that grows food at a local school. Container GardeningArtist Kebreab Demeke made his "Cli...

Uwe Hermann via Flickr CC/CC BY 1.0 You might want sit down for this sour bite of news. Without sugar-coating, the white stuff we inhaled as kids, in excess, takes a toll far more toxic than cavities. The National Post shares a report published this week that suggests sugar is so toxic that it should be regulated like alcohol. How toxic is toxic? Think obesity, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, high cholesterol, liver toxicity and other chronic diseases related to inflammation. Sneaky Sugar Bo...

© Kyle Thiermann The nuclear disaster in Japan was a wake up call for the world and since then all but 11 of the 50 nuclear reactors in Japan have been closed and the rest will likely go offline in the next year. Germany, Switzerland, Spain, and Israel are all looking away from nuclear power as a result of the catastrophe. But even with all the worldwide pushback, South Africa is set to construct a massive nuclear power plant in Jeffreys Bay, widely known as one of the best surfing spots in t...

Brooklyn Botanic Garden/Video screen capture This autumn, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden transformed the roof of its new Visitor Center into a wild meadow, complete with 40,000 plants. The 10,000 square foot space was put together in a month that included soil dispersal, planting and watering. This timelapse video condenses that process into two minutes (and 3,600 individual photographs), and also features a reminder of the surprise snowfall that hit the East Coast right before Halloween. The ro...

© Reuters/CORBIS We haven?t heard much environmental news from actor-activist Leonardo DiCaprio lately. Remember the film The 11th Hour and Greenburg on Planet Green? But now you can get your morning coffee fix celebrity-style with Leo's fair trade, organic coffee that?s farmed in Haiti, Peru, Ethiopia, and Brazil: LYON, the new high-end line of ?green? beans from coffee roaster La Colombe Torrefaction. Proceeds (100%) from this conscious coffee will benefit the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation (...

Windfall the Movie/Promo image Wind Power Will Eat Your BabiesI can't wait to see this. Until I do, I guess I'll have to wait to pass judgment on the film itself, which opens today. Right now, I'll just stick to the trailer, which is unintentionally hilarious?what is nefarious, er, Big Wind trying to hide? The filmaker couldn't have made a more sensational anti-wind statement if the coal industry paid her to. Watch: "Windfall" follows a standard documentary template, 'The Horrors of Big Busine...

© Milagros Lecuona Since the High Line opened in New York City in 2009, there has been widespread enthusiasm for parks in unexpected (and narrow) places. The latest proposal is for the Tappan Zee Bridge in Tarrytown, which crosses the Hudson River 20 miles north of New York City and is slated for replacement and demolition. Tappan Bridge Park would be a three mile long linear park over an especially beautiful stretch of river. Joe Shlabotnik/CC BY 2.0. The Tappan Zee Bridge, over the Hudson Ri...

NASA/Public Domain See that crack? That's evidence from NASA that Antarctica is just about to get smaller by around, oh, the size of New York City. National Geographic reports: With a gargantuan crack slowly splitting it apart, Antarctica's fastest-melting glacier is about to lose a chunk of ice larger than all of New York City, scientists say.The crevasse stretches 19 miles (30 kilometers) long and up to 260 feet (80 meters) wide, as shown in a picture taken by NASA's Terra satellite in Octob...

Facebook/Screen capture It's pretty depressing to consider that even now, well into the 21st century, highly respected scientists are still harassed, intimidated, and attacked for their work. Ever since the far-right latched on to the hacked email event at the University of East Anglia, the well-regarded paleoclimatologist Michael Mann has been particularly victimized by conspiracy theorists and ideologues who claim global warming is a hoax. He, his colleagues, even their families have receive...