conservation

Each year as the weather warms, crowds of families and tourists flock to the beaches. People sometimes don’t realize the risk they take when they enter the ocean, a vast aquatic habitat. Newsrooms in coastal communities are well aware that when humans and wildlife interact, the results can be tragic – especially when sharks make an appearance. Even a minor run-in with a shark can send someone to the emergency room for surgery and stitches.

Current LED lamps are five times more efficient than incandescent lamps and have a much longer lifespan than compact fluorescent light bulbs. To evaluate a product’s true efficiency, however, its entire life must be taken into consideration, from manufacture through disposal.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, urbanized land in the United States increased by 48% from 1982 to 2003 and now covers more than 100 million acres. This expansion of cities and suburbs has had significant impacts on wildlife through habitat loss, pollution and the introduction of nonnative species.

Land use in the United States has always been marked by change — forest has become cropland and then returned again; towns have grown in rural areas only to disappear; cities have grown, suburbs have spread.  In the last 25 years, however, change has accelerated in ways that depart from previous trends, even as the stakes have gotten higher — land use can have real effects on climate change, wildlife habitat and now even energy production.

Press coverage of energy, whether from fossil fuels, nuclear, or renewables, tends to be dominated by talk of production. Production is only half the story, though: Every energy equation is a balance between generation and consumption, and both count equally.