International Conservation & Development

For 2011 Switzer Fellow Jeannette Laramee, it all started with designing a school in Zambia, Africa. That led to building systems that make biogas, which can save up to 10,000 pounds of firewood a year for a family in Africa.

"Some coralline algae produce a chemical that induces coral settlement, in which the larval stage in the water settles on the ocean floor to grow into an adult. This settlement must happen for reefs to recover after disturbance," said lead author Jennifer O'Leary, a research associate with the Institute of Marine Sciences at UC Santa Cruz.

LITZINGER12:34:22 Okay. Are we causing a problem? For example, here in the United States, we are a consumer society. Sometimes we don't think about where things come from. What's the connection between what we buy and the Sumatran Tiger? KRAMME12:34:34

Emily Eliza Scott is an interdisciplinary scholar and artist whose work focuses on the creative-critical interpretation of contemporary landscapes. In 2010, she completed a PhD in art history at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her dissertation, “Wasteland: American Landscapes in/and 1960s Art,” examines early land-based art in relation to the actual spaces and spatial politics it engaged, pursuing how and why degraded environments served as fertile grounds for artistic experimentation in this period.

On this Switzer Network News report, we learn about the intersection between global climate change and agriculture, why current "solutions" are inadequate and where we need to go next globally.

As a college student in the mid-1980s, Maria Fernandez-Gimenez worked as a seasonal interpreter for the National Park Service. That’s when she was first exposed to the great Western debate over public-lands ranching. She soon became familiar with environmentalists’ gripes about grazing impacts, but realized she knew nothing about the ranchers’ point of view. So she went to work on a distant cousin’s ranch in northwestern Colorado, where she spent the summer sleeping in a hayloft.

When you talk to climate scientists about winners and losers, a few words come up over and over again: could, might, maybe. According to University of Arizona environmental economist Derek Lemoine, local climate-change patterns are difficult to predict because uncertainties in the global model “are compounded when considering smaller scales.” Read the full story

What will cost $7 billion; will snake across the country from Alberta to the Gulf Coast, carrying 700,000 barrels a day of Canadian crude oil; and seems (at least from the animated assertions of Congressional Republicans and the American Petroleum Institute) a perfect solution for the flagging U.S. economy? Answer: TransCanada’s Keystone oil sands pipeline expansion project. Imagine a river of dirty oil running right through the country’s mid-section. Read the entire piece

Linda Kramme, manager of the forest program at World Wildlife Fund, said her organization and others applaud Kroger for making a responsible business decision. “WWF and other groups that are asking consumers not to buy Mercury’s products...aren’t trying to put Mercury or APP out of business, but simply asking them to adhere to the same forestry practices that responsible pulp and paper companies the world over adhere to,’’ she said.