Many of us have clothing, accessories, and linens that we haven’t used in years. Instead of letting them take up valuable storage space in your home, help them find a second home through recycling.
Brownfields: Untold Stories, Unrealized Value
Across the country, in distressed urban centers, hundreds of thousands of industrial sites have been left lying fallow. These properties, known as brownfields, embody the story of America’s twentieth-century industrial might and bear the mark of that period’s unenlightened practices. Their closing and subsequent abandonment culminated in the loss of well-paying manufacturing jobs, the creation of urban blight and the legacy of environmental contamination. However, research suggests that brownfields may be the missing link in the emerging green economy and one of the keys to America’s economic comeback.
Fresh Evidence of Life on Mars?
In a landscape shaped by wind and water, is it possible that microbial life was found on Mars in 1976? A new paper indicates life may be present, and a new mission to Mars may confirm the results.
The Little Things and Their Influence on Planet Earth
![Massive algae bloom of of the coast of Patagonia. [Wikimedia Commons]](http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Patagonian_Bloom-150x110.jpg)
In the last century we have witnessed incredible environmental leaps in our understanding of planet Earth. With a focus on integrated, systems thinking we invite you to register for an interactive online webinar that explores the relations that living organisms have with respect to each other and their natural environment.
Upcoming Certificate Course: The Sustainable City
More than half of the world’s population now lives in urban settings, making sustainable urban management a critical concern. This course introduces you to the fundamentals of urban environmental management and sustainability with a special focus on New York City.
Save those Acorns for the Apocalypse
As biodiversity takes a hit from climate change, forward thinking groups store seed samples in gene banks. The idea: if an entire species is wiped out, scientists can repopulate from the samples. Hello, plant versions of Adam and Eve.
Expanding Overseas Study Opportunities
A golf-ball-sized rhinoceros beetle flies through the open-air pavilion and lands on my table. I look up from my notes, an attempt at reworking my African wild dog study methods, and realize I haven’t seen one of these mighty beasts since my junior year in South Africa. The beetle is a welcome companion on this quiet, star-studded night in Jordan’s Ajloun Forest Reserve. Creature comforts: another perspective shift made possible by the Columbia Global Centers.
The Sea of Green
What we call forest—addressing it simply as an object in space—is in fact an ever-shifting process, a living and breathing colony possessed of a body, a purpose, and a lifespan—at once noun, a verb, an adjective. In these budding, bristling eons of development, the forests came to be the lungs of the organic Earth, an incredible organ that generates a bounty of oxygen and a great regulator of global climate patterns.
A Documentary: CERC Students Explore E-Waste Warehouse
CERC students visit and document their experiences on video at the Lower East Side Ecology Center’s new permanent e-waste warehouse located in Gowanus, Brooklyn.
At the Bottom of the Bottom of the World
As we in North America emerge from a remarkably mild winter, the brief and sunny summer in the world’s deep south is drawing to a rapid close. Antarctica’s days are becoming shorter, and come the vernal equinox the South Pole will enter into its yearly hibernation—six months of dusk and night. Researchers from Columbia University and elsewhere have spent these bright months bearing the chill in pursuit of access to a realm deep beneath the soaring, scathing surface of the glacier.
