Almost 50 years ago, fried chicken tycoon David Bamberger used his fortune to purchase 5,500 acres of overgrazed land in the Texas Hill Country. Planting grasses to soak in rains and fill hillside aquifers, Bamberger devoted the rest of his life to restoring the degraded landscape. Today, the land has been restored to its original habitat and boasts enormous biodiversity. Bamberger’s model of land stewardship is now being replicated across the region and he is considered to be a visionary in land management and water conservation.
Category: Making Changes
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The mission to restore an Australian wetland – BBC News
Walker Swamp had been artificially drained and farmed for 150 years, but it is now welcoming new life once more, after a huge restoration project.
Its revival is one “message of hope” amid so much grim environmental news, ecologists tell the BBC.
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How Scientists Are Restoring The Great Barrier Reef
Over the past couple of years, coral on the Great Barrier Reef has regenerated and local scientists have developed innovative ways to foster coral growth both in and out of the water.
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Returning Chicago’s shoreline to a natural state
Chicago has a number of experiments underway to find the most effective ways to return its shores to nature. This video, by the Architecture with Stewart YouTube channel, explores a few sites and the techniques being employed to return them to a natural state.
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Windcatchers – An ancient method for cooling air.
How they work, from the History with Kayleigh YouTube channel.
“A wind catcher is never by itself, but always accompanied by at least one other wind tower on the same building. The Wind catcher catches the wind, which is then funnelled down and will flow throughout the building, the cool air will flow underneath the warm air, and the pressure will push the warm air upwards which then rises and flows throughout another wind tower which in turn releases the warmed up air.”
Could this be used in modern construction to cool buildings?
There are interesting comments posted with this video that are worth checking out.
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Microfibers are being shedded from your clothes and fabric. It’s a big problem. Here’s what you can do.
- Microplastics are tiny pieces of plastic that measure less than 5 millimeters in length
- There are few places on earth where they haven’t been found
“We have a plastic pollution crisis,” said Alexis Jackson, a marine biologist and scientist with the California chapter of the Nature Conservancy, an environmental advocacy organization. “The face of that crisis looks a lot different [than we thought]. It’s not just plastic bags and soda bottles. It’s all of these microplastics that you can’t see with the naked eye that are pervasive in the environment.”
Read Your Laundry Sheds Harmful Microfibers. Here’s What You Can Do About It from the New York Times.