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Earth is 4.5 billion years old. Mankind is 140,000 years old. If condensed into 24 hours, then humans have been alive for just 3 seconds. And look at all that we have done to our planet. We have “covered our ears to mother nature’s screams and closed our eyes to her help wanted signs”. Watch Prince Ea’s mesmerizing monologue and fact-filled rhymes pleading for the world to come together to ensure we make it to the fourth second. 

Blog by Joanna Chin, Doctoral Student, York University-Environmental Studies

“Learning is the only way to turn failure into success.”

The global energy landscape is changing dramatically as evidenced by the following five trends.

1. Last year, coal production fell by a record number. A higher number of producers than ever before are switching to natural gas, wind, and solar energy.

2. The world’s largest economies are among those who are turning away from coal. China and the U.S. are the world’s largest two economies, so their reduced use of coal has the most impact.

The Conference Board released a report showing what works and what doesn’t work when it comes to big companies and the circular economy. The traditional linear model of ‘take, make, waste’ results in a huge amount of consumption and waste (85 billion tons of global natural resource use annually as of 2015, a number which is expected to double by 2050). This approach is not sustainable - neither for the companies nor for the planet.

As the Trump Administration announces their plans to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement, other countries are set to take the lead in reducing global carbon emissions.

In 2008, Norway established a lifeline for humanity to ensure the survival of our precious food supply. On the Arctic island of Spitsbergen, the Norwegian Government built a “failsafe” freezer vault in a permafrost mountain located in the Arctic circle. Intended as insurance for the world, it was filled with nearly a million packets of seeds, each containing an important global food crop.

When it comes to recycling, two provinces are the best in Canada. The Paper & Paperboard Packaging Environmental Council has just released a useful summary of this information, based on their analysis of StatsCan data.

Support is making a splash at the 2017 Venice Biennale. This monumental sculpture, crafted by artist Lorenzo Quinn, depicts giant ceramic hands reaching from the Grand Canal in Venice to brace the Ca’ Sagredo Hotel.

Stanford University economist, Tony Seba, has just released a new study forecasting that "the entire market for land transport will switch to electrification, leading to a collapse of oil prices and the demise of the petroleum industry as we have known it".