While to many it might seem like a great challenge, a home garden can bring green space to your city, fresh organic vegetables to your table, and a great space to your community. Whether it's a large garden or a few plants inside your home, plants bring great benefits to your life – especially when provided with ...
Imagine if your workout clothes repelled smell. Great, right? The idea is, but the actual substances used to give clothes antibacterial properties might pose a risk to your health and the environment. Luckily, recent studies prove that natural extracts such as Neem can provide the same antibacterial protection without ...
With the rise of the fashion industry and mass retailer brands, producing clothing at a massive scale under the lowest costs has led to the heavy use of chemicals in order to manufacture and preserve clothes. The non-organic cotton industry is the highest user of the herbicide glyphosate, a substance that is ...
Commercial farming focuses on producing large amounts of food, but doesn't take into account that chemical pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers threaten ecosystems, and wildlife, while also damaging the soil and affecting the nutritional value of crops. Organic farming represents not only an alternative but rather ...
What would happen if the entire farming industry turned organic? According to the Organic Trade Association, if every farmer in the U.S. produced organic foods, 500 millions pounds of harmful pesticides could be eliminated per year. Why Should We Change to Organic Farming? Traditional farming involves the use of ...
From oil spills that cause the devastation of entire ecosystems, to deforestation, and even air pollution, fossil fuels have caused many damages to our planet. Even though sustainable alternatives like biofuel exist, fossil fuels are still the most frequently used combustibles. As the primary source of CO2, they are ...
By August 2, 2017, we will have used more from Mother Nature than she can replenish in the whole year. For the rest of the year, we will be living on resources taken from future generations. More ecological resources and services are used than the world can regenerate through overfishing, overharvesting forests, and ...
After the controversial article published by David Wallace-Wells in the New York Magazine in early July, people have questioned the effectiveness of using scare tactics. One of the biggest controversies was the harrowing nature of the report. Is this an effective way to motive action? Or does it simply fatigue and ...
In the Gulf of Mexico, an aquatic dead zone has been growing in size for decades and this summer, when the zone spreads to its peak area of the year, will cover 8,198 square miles, an area around the size of the state of New Jersey. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), this will be ...
Over the past year, chlorpyrifos, a synthetic chemical, has been popping up consistently in the news. First, with the chemical linked to bee colony collapse disorder. Now, with new research: according to a study from the New Zealand’s University of Otago, bees suffer severe learning and memory impairment after ...
Could the way we talk about climate change affect how people react to it? Absolutely! By explaining concepts using large, hypothetical figures and percentages, people “yawn.” For example, saying that coal use in the United States has dropped by 20% in just two years, people immediately turn off and their eyes glaze ...
Celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, Pollinator Week 2017 began as a reminder to address the mass decline of pollinator populations around the world. Today, it is an international celebration of the valuable services birds, bees, butterflies, bats, and beetles provide to the ecosystem. Unfortunately, declining ...
What if you and your children were physically unable to live in your city? If the global community fails to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, many cities in the Persian Gulf will be too hot to live in by the end of the century. However, this is a global problem the world is facing. According to the World Health ...
Every World Environment Day, we are reminded of the growing need that our planet has for us to take better care and to be more responsible. We have only one world, and without the proper care and protection of the environment, mankind will cease to survive. This year, the objective of World Environment Day is for all ...
In a study on urban trees from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (UNFAO), trees were found to drastically improve quality of life! Some of the things that trees improve in urban areas: Mental health Water flow and water quality Carbon sequestration Air cleanliness and quality ...
What if the narrative of organic and conventional food you are being told isn’t the truth? What if its been tampered with, played with, false hypotheses thrust into our everyday media? That’s exactly what has happened. In a recently released report, Spinning Food, by Friends of the Earth, an independent, grassroots ...
According to a new report from the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, the aggressive promotion of pesticides has led to a violation of human rights - our right to adequate food and our right to health. The report emphasizes that “the right to food obligates States to implement protective measures and food ...
“This is not a partisan debate; it’s a human one. Clean air and water and a livable climate are inalienable human rights. And solving this crisis is not a question of politics. It is our moral obligation.” - Leonardo DiCaprio, United Nations Climate Summit, 2014 With the recent change of power in the United States ...
Are you worried about the fate of the planet? You should be. Why? There is a predicted population increase of 3 billion people in the next 30 years. That is a 40% increase in the population! The world reached its first billion just 200 years ago, and during the 20th century alone, the population increased ...
Earth Overshoot Day, also known as Ecological Debt Day, is the day of the year when humanity’s consumption of resources overtakes the earth’s ability to naturally regenerate those resources. In 2018, this day came earlier than it ever has before: On August 1st we began to rob time and resources from future ...
One of the most common and effective synthetic insect repellents, DEET, is surrounded by controversy. As more and more scientific research has been done on DEET, consumers still worry about unknown health effects that the man-made chemical could cause. There have been many documented health impacts and developmental ...
Contamination and city smog is one of the current issues affecting hundreds of millions of people globally. Each year, 5.5 million people die due to air pollution. Beijing, one of the most polluted cities in the world, has dedicated $2.7 billion to solve the problem. So, how can we ensure clean air with neem? Neem is ...
What is neem? Neem is a tree, native to India, that is used as a natural pesticide and fertilizer, as a natural ingredient in cosmetics, as an additive to livestock feed and in pet care products, and even in healthcare treatments! Every part of the tree can be used - the bark, the leaves, the flowers, the gum, ...
The first wild bee to be listed as an endangered species, the rusty patched bumblebee, represents the danger that synthetic pesticides pose to our environment and future survival. The United Nations recently released a global assessment stating that 40% of invertebrate pollinator species are in danger of extinction. ...
As an actor I pretend for a living. I play fictitious characters often solving fictitious problems. I believe humankind has looked at climate change in that same way: as if it were a fiction, happening to someone else’s planet, as if pretending that climate change wasn’t real would somehow make it go away. ...
Water scarcity is an issue that threatens life itself, causing thirst, food shortages, displacement, and disease. More than 4 billion people worldwide are at risk of drought and half a billion already face severe water scarcity year round. When water is hard to find, sub prime, or heavily contaminated water, is ...
The very nature of neem makes the tree ideal for reforestation and carbon sequestration efforts. Fast growing, with a large surface biomass and thick foliage, neem has an impressive capacity to capture carbon in the atmosphere with a sequestration capacity of 12.27 tons per tree per year. One of the most resilient, ...
The deforestation problem and how we can help it, in one simple image.
The human population created almost 36 gigatonnes of CO2 during 2014, 60% over the levels experienced in 1990. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, global carbon emissions from fossil fuels have risen by 90% since 1970. Even though these statistics are jarring, there is a problem: every ...
At the end of 2013, 26.5m hectares of forest plantations were supported by carbon finance, according to NGO Forest Trends, with $212 million injected into the sector during the previous year. This represents growth of 9% y-o-y and is based on coverage of 162 projects across 58 countries. Part altruism, part ...
One of the more practical and achievable ways to cleanse our environment and ensure an equitable future is to lock up, or sequester, more carbon from the atmosphere through the simple process of planting more trees worldwide. Neem has a high rate of photosynthesis and liberates more oxygen than many other tree ...
An explanation of consequences if businesses do not shift to more sustainable conduct and the importance of sustainable practices in reducing the amount of worldwide carbon emissions.
Population growth is unrelenting – The 40% increase in our population expected by 2050 will require the production of 70% more food and 100% more protein. At the same time: Arable land is in decline – 12 million hectares (29.6 million acres) of arable land is degrading each year, a rate 35x that was experienced ...
An explanation of soil health in the Dakota Research Farms and how diversity in planting gives farmers the benefits and costs to stay productive .
We currently use 1.6x the earth's available resources. Unless moves are made to explore sustainability, living on our planet may mean having to make do with less. Farmland availability is shrinking, much of it to make way for expanding urban populations. Crop yields are no longer expanding and the ‘Green Revolution’ ...
Sustaining the needs of a global population that has tripled in the last century alone is one of the major challenges of modern man. The global population has increased by 45% to 7 billion since the dawn of the new millennium, and is expected to hit at least 9.7 billion by 2050. By 2100, the human population will have ...
How do we manage our business, should we do some things differently.
