This is a good piece about trying to grow trees sustainably in a resource-poor area, the power of trees to combat desertification and the importance/impact of community buy-in.

A huge chunk of Niger is Sahara desert, and what’s not outright desert gets just a smattering of rain. You don’t expect to see a lot of trees in this land-locked, West African country.

But that’s exactly what ecologist Mahamane Larwanou and geographer Gray Tappan see when they roll out a satellite photo of central Niger. Both are passionate about understanding why trees are making a big comeback in many parts of Niger

Forcing your PC to pull another pointless all-nighter isn’t just polluting, it’s also a waste of money. Make that a lot of money. Nearly half of all corporate computers in the United States don’t get turned off at night, costing U.S. businesses $1.72 billion in annual energy costs and spewing 14.4 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere per year, according to a new report.

Ouch.

It is a collision between the ideals of alternative energy and the suburban reality of New Jersey’s notorious not-in-my-backyard culture, casting Mr. Mercurio in the role of a latter-day environmental knight errant and his neighbor and principal adversary as the ecological equivalent of Cruella De Vil.

Sometime I love the writing in the Times.

A great review of Alan Weisman’s book “The World Without Us”.

In this extended thought experiment, Weisman does not specify exactly what finishes off Homo sapiens; instead he simply assumes the abrupt disappearance of our species and projects the sequence of events that would most likely occur in the years, decades and centuries afterward.
…
What would happen to all of our stuff if we weren’t here anymore? Could nature wipe out all of our traces? Are there some things that we’ve made that are indestructible or indelible? Could nature, for example, take New York City back to the forest that was there when Henry Hudson first saw it in 1609?

Weisman also wrote Gaviotas.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, distillers can produce about 2.7 gallons of ethanol per bushel of corn. In 2006, U.S. farmers produced about 10.5 billion bushels of the grain. So, even if Congress mandated that all of America’s corn be turned into ethanol, it would yield only about 28.3 billion gallons, far less than the mandated volume [36 billion gallons]. And, clearly, most of America’s corn is still going to be used for animal feed, family barbecues, and high-fructose corn syrup.

Be sure to read page two as well.

Nat Torkington says, “In Collapse, Jared Diamond wondered what the person who cut down the last tree on Easter Island was thinking as he did so. On the Solomon Islands, he’ll soon have the chance to put that question to that person.”

Rising prices for food have led the United Nations programme fighting famine in Africa and other regions to warn that it can no longer afford to feed the 90m people it has helped for each of the past five years on its budget.

[T]he Department of Defense last week announced a “wearable power” competition. The objective: a prototype system that can power a standard soldier’s equipment for 96 hours. It also has to pack less than half the weight of the current batteries carried–all of the components, including the power generator, electrical storage, control electronics, connectors and fuel, must weigh 4 kilograms or less, the Defense Department says.

A competition is scheduled for the fall of 2008. At that time, the top three competitors will have to demonstrate the use of a complete, wearable system that produces an average of 20 watts of power for the four-day period, under realistic conditions.

How much would you want this for doing field work/site visits in a remote area?

There’s an opinion piece by Christopher Hawthorne in the LA Times about the potential absence of star architects, lazily referred to as ’starchitects’, from the realm of humanitarian architecture. When I say humanitarian architecture, I’m referring to such causes as environmentalism, poverty, or illness, etc. Hawthorne laments the lack of a green Rem Koolhaus, smacking on about Peter Eisenman as the villain of green and Zaha Hadid as careless of anything other than her legacy.