Woodland farms (also known as forest gardens) are an agricultural concept which copies a self-sustaining forest ecosystem except that it is made to produce a variety of food that is easily harvestable. Woodland farms have a lot of different things going on in them to maximize sustainability, efficiency, and productivity but they are all simple, [...]

Wind turbines, hydro dams, turbines that run on steam from geothermal, nuclear, fossil fuels, biomass, etc.  All of these use a spinning motion derived from rising steam, flowing water or blowing wind to generate electricity. How do they do it? You’re about to find out.
Electricity happens when electrons start moving around. Running or spinning a [...]

Coral reefs are masses of natural structures composed of skeletal material from by reef-building (or hard) corals, small organisms that grow in shallow water. Corals are found in both temperate and tropical waters. Reefs, however, can only form within about 30° of the Equator. They leave their exoskeletons when they die and the tide [...]

Everyone has seen pictures of wind turbines— those sleek, white, three-bladed giants, usually standing in a group in a green field. When you hear about wind turbines, unless those are specifically implied, that is not what should come to mind. They are noisy eyesores which, though producing renewble energy, take  a ton of energy to [...]

Who cares about sea grass? You should. Sea grass is an incredibly important environment for all kinds of marine life. Not only does it support the fising industry with the large quantities of fish it is inhabited by, sea grass processes waste that is dumped into the sea, cushioning the blow on the local marine [...]

The other day I noticed something that even adults don’t usually realise. When you buy a product that uses no elecricity or batteries, yet it does something, you need to consider where the energy comes from. To do this, you need a basic understanding of energy. (skip the next bit if you think you already [...]

As I said in a previous post, I made a solar oven out of a cardboard box (well, actually two cardboard boxes, a sheet of plexiglass, newspaper, black paint, and tape) and wanted to try it out.
To test the oven  I got one of those super unhealthy cookie dough rolls from the store (So I [...]

Says Michael Pollan, journalist and author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, as well as his newest book, In Defense of food. These seven words are his guidelines for a healthy diet, but, as he said, his publisher was looking for 60,000 words not a post card.
Fortunately, it is a lot more complicated than that. At the [...]

Why are permeable sidewalks (sidewalks that allow water to drain through them) a sustainable option?
With normal sidewalks, water washes off all of the chemicals that lie around on our roads and sidewalks. Then all this dirty water goes back into the water system. If the sidewalk is permeable, water filters through it dispersing the chemicals [...]

Biomimicry is basically developing technology that mimics, or copies, what we find in nature. There are many examples of this, some are old ideas and some are very modern. The first ideas to build flying machines came from birds, but that was a long time ago. Now people are coming up with ways of making [...]

The spirit bear, or Kermode bear, used to just be a legend. It has been discovered that these bears are real; yet also we learned that they are on the brink of extinction from, like many other animals, habitat loss.
Spirit bears are a genetically unique sub-species of black bear. In every ten spirit bears one [...]

Guerrilla gardening is essentially beautifying and/or producing food from places that are neglected. Usually they are city property. An example of guerilla gardening is growing flowers on those strips of grass along sidewalks.
Yesterday I went to a conference called Growing Citizens: Gardening as a catalyst for civic engagement. One of the speakers talked about the [...]