Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “National Academy of Sciences”
In 2008, Tim DeChristopher found himself bidding for parcels of public land around Arches and Canyonlands National Parks of Utah at an illegitimate Bureau of Land Management oil and gas lease auction. A climate activist acting as a bidder at the auction, DeChristopher ended up successfully winning 22,500 acres of land by bidding a total of $1.8 million, which he …
Remember the good old days when climate change was something that would occur a century or more in the future? Something we could avoid if we played our cards right? As the years rolled by, the time between us and that faraway future bedeviling our great-grandchildren first shortened and then disappeared. In an April 2015 studypublished in Nature, climate scientists wrote …
The 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster was horrific to watch unfold. It will take decades — and billions of dollars — to clean up, as more problems seem to emerge by the minute. Most recently, Tepco announced that it’s still missing a large amount of spent fuel — in part because radiation remains so high that robots and other devices cannot function inside the plant to give …
Tamar Haspel is a journalist who’s been on the food and science beat for the best part of two decades. She writes a monthly Washington Post column, Unearthed, which covers food supply issues: biotech, pesticides, food additives, antibiotics, organics, nutrition, and food policy. The column has earned a James Beard award nomination each of its two years, winning in 2015, and one of her columns was selected for Best Food Writing 2015. Haspel is knee-deep in the public food conversation, and speaks frequently at venues where the debates about our food supply play out, including the National Academy of Sciences, food- and ag-related conferences, and SXSW.
When she’s tired of the heavy lifting of journalism, she gets dirty. She and her husband, Kevin Flaherty, raise their own chickens, catch their own fish, grow their own tomatoes, hunt their own venison, and generally try to stay connected to the idea that food has to come from somewhere. They also have an oyster farm, Barnstable Oyster, where they grown about 50,000 oysters a year in the beautiful waters off Cape Cod. Haspel revels in the idea that New York diners pay $3. a pop for their product, and she can eat as many as she wants.
A new review of four decades of science has come to this conclusion: organic agriculture has a key role to play in feeding the world. To analyze the body of research, author John Reganold, Regents Professor of Soil Science and Agroecology at Washington State University, and doctoral candidate Jonathan Wachter compared conventional and organic farming using the metrics of productivity, environmental impact, …
PULLMAN, Wash.–Washington State University researchers have concluded that feeding a growing global population with sustainability goals in mind is possible. Their review of hundreds of published studies provides evidence that organic farming can produce sufficient yields, be profitable for farmers, protect and improve the environment and be safer for farm workers. The review study, “Organic Agriculture in the 21st Century,” …
In the late 1970s, scientists first came to a consensus that global warming was likely to result from increasing greenhouse gases released by the burning of fossil fuels. This idea had been around since the turn of the century, but the development of computer models made it possible to make quantitative predictions. Almost immediately, a small group of politically connected …
Harvey Wasserman As the first Democrat presidential debate finally approaches (on Oct. 13), America’s nuke power industry is in accelerated collapse. The few remaining construction projects in the U.S. and Europe are engineering and economic disasters. Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders may address this in broad terms. But as a nation we must now focus on the 99 dying U.S. reactors that threaten us all every …
Scientists and environmentalists are concerned that a new technique for generated “supercharged” genetically modified organisms (GMOs) could be misused and trigger a health emergency or natural disaster. The “gene drive” technology allows GMOs to spread rapidly in the wild. The fear is that these organisms could fall into the wrong hands or accidentally spark a catastrophe. The technology is being …
They knew. They lied. And the planet and its people are now paying the ultimate price. It’s no secret that the fossil fuel industry—the set of companies and corporate interests which profit most from the burning of coal, oil, and gas—have been the largest purveyors and funders of climate change denialism in the world. Now, a new set of documents and …
