“We cannot expect nature to remain in a constant condition and thus provide us with a simple solution to the questions of what is “natural” and what is desirable.”  (Botkin 1990, p 181) .  Just one of many great thoughts in Daniel Botkin’s 1990 classic: Discor... [More]

Do you feel uneasy?  Maybe your local ecosystem has taken a turn for the worse.  According to ecopsycology, we humans suffer profound discomfort when our habitat feels like it is being degraded.  As discussed in an article in this week’s NY times magazine.  Ecopsychology&nb... [More]

Will the census of the future ask homeowners how many trees they have on their property? With humanity now faced with a changing climate under even the most stringent efforts to reduce carbon emissions, carbon accounting has become a hot topic for scientists, politicians and economists.  While... [More]

Should we conserve nature even if it is not wild?  Humans have transformed 40% of earth’s ice-free land into crop fields, pastures and settlements, and have embedded another 37% within used and populated landscapes (anthromes).  While 23% is still free of people and their... [More]

Not only do humans burn away forests to enhance their food supply, they also do it when they battle each other!  Or so says a study published by Zhen Li and his colleagues this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Li et al. 2009).  By linking a careful inve... [More]

Here is an open question to the group and readers:Is there a typical human habitat, and if so, what does it look like?More than likely, there is a distribution of different habitat types that humans occupy at a global, regional, and even local levels, but perhaps there are some common patterns. ... [More]

The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has recently released the first comprehensive digital map of wetlands across China, based on remote sensing imagery.  The effort was led by PengGong, of CAS Institute of Remote Sensing Applications in Beijing and University of California, Berkeley.  We... [More]

While you are driving to work, plume of carbon drifting lazily into the sky, do you ever wonder where all of your carbon will end up?  Now, work by Simon Lewis and a large team of collaborators (Lewis et al 2009) have shown that about 1/6th of the carbon emitted annually to the atmosphere ... [More]