Most of us take our breathing for granted, but we aren’t all lucky enough to live in a place with clean air. In Beijing, pollution has gotten so bad that breathing the air has become dangerous. There are days when the smog is thick enough to block out the sun. On these days, schools close, and construction stops. People walk around the city wearing masks to avoid breathing in the dangerous smog, which contains harmful particles from coal power plants.
The Landfill Harmonic
Teacher Fabio Chavez leads a children’s orchestra in a slum built upon garbage. The Landfill Harmonic orchestra gets its name from the word ‘philharmonic,’ which means ‘music loving.’ Chavez brings his love of music and a passion for social change to the kids of Cateura, a town outside the capital of Paraguay that is built upon a landfill.
Nature Returns As Humans Retreat Indoors
After 13 years of playing hard to get, two giant pandas in Hong Kong’s Ocean Park Zoo have finally mated. Zookeepers were over the moon. Pandas have a mating season of just 24 to 72 hours per year. Normally the zoo is flooded with throngs of daily visitors. But since the zoo has been closed because of the coronavirus, these two pandas finally got the privacy they needed.
Oil Billionaire’s Plan To Clean The Ocean
Kjell Inge Roekke is a man of contradictions. The billionaire owner of an oil company sounds like an unlikely environmentalist, but he is determined to clean up the oceans.
Leave Only Footprints
Burn it or bury it. In most places around the world, that’s what we do with our garbage. Pretty grim choices. Burning garbage releases dangerous gasses and dust, which contribute to pollution of the air, land, and water, not to mention global warming. While burying it leads to more pollution of the ground and water. And to make matters worse, tons of garbage – most of it plastic – ends up in the ocean.
The Happy City
Did you know that living in a city is actually pretty bad for your happiness? Studies show that you’re more likely to be happy the smaller the city that you live in. But with 5 billion people living in cities by 2030, is there a way we can change the unhappiness found in cities?
Earthships – Sustainable Homes of the Future
Have you ever wondered what homes of the future will be like? In our opinion, they will be cheap, environmentally friendly, easy to build, and will use sustainable energy sources. Actually, these types of homes already exist. They are called Earthships.
An Earthship is made from natural and recycled materials like tires, cans, bottles, earth, used wood, and plastic. Also, they are off-the-grid homes, meaning that they do not need to rely on public utilities (like electricity) which is usually generated with fossil fuels or nuclear power. The burning of fossil fuels leads to pollution and global warming, while nuclear power plants can be highly poisonous if they leak.