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Yes, the 'ecological footprint' can be useful in suggesting areas where humanity has unsustainable practices which need to be improved.
However, the footprint is usually presented in a very misleading way, as it dramatically oversimplifies sustainability and implies that all efforts to achieve sustainability are equal. If such a score was used as a basis ...
26
Not an authoritative source , just a blogger, but a decent attempt to explain some of the cali water issues that's reasonably well sourced itself.
California receives a total of 80 million acre-feet [99 km³] of water per year. Of those, 23 million [28 km³] are stuck in wild rivers (the hydrological phenomenon, not the theme park). These aren’t dammed and ...
20
Do wind turbines kill many birds each year?
In short:
An upper estimate might be of the order of half a million birds per year in the USA.
However it seems that hundreds of millions of birds are killed by
collisions with other man-made structures. So wind turbines account for a small percentage of bird deaths attributable to human activity.
Nevertheless ...
19
No, the Great Barrier Reef is not dead.
According to Exploring the hidden shallows: extensive reef development and resilience within the turbid nearshore Great Barrier Reef (2016):
Mean coral cover on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef (GBR) has reportedly declined by over 15% during the last
30 years. Climate change events and outbreaks of coral disease ...
15
As far as we can tell, yes. Rangers in Kaziranga park have killed 72 suspected poachers between 2007 and February 10th, 2017
Here is a report from the BBC from February 10th regarding the park and its policy.
Its rangers have been given the kind of powers to shoot and kill normally only conferred on armed forces policing civil unrest.
They have a chart ...
13
The simple answer is yes. The more complex answer is that the number of deaths is nothing in comparison to other man made structures and the risks from climate change.
There have been several studies done to find the environmental impact of wind farms on birds. Generally birds lack the ability to dodge humans and their quest for global supremacy. From the ...
12
Nancy Beckham explains in Trees: finding their true value about how the valuation was done.
It was published in Indian Biologist, Vol XI, No. 1-2, 1979, by T.M. Das, a journal which is edited by... T.M. Das.
Prof Das's system looked at a number of factors, one of which was oxygen production. The net accumulation of one gram of carbon in a tree was ...
9
David Bennett from the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission has a great article on this topic in Tropical Rainforest Research, under the title of "Valuing a Tree: The Ethics of Environmental Evaluation." The gist of it is that converting trees to currency is not an exact science. A number of assumptions could go into such a calculation, producing ...
9
The Australian Marine Conservation Society's web site is http://www.marineconservation.org.au/ . Doing a search for shark cull million on their web site gets as the first hit Government on shark watch as cull shelved
Yet despite being essential to a healthy marine environment, the
world's shark populations are experiencing significant decline, with
...
7
We don't really know.
Despite the claims of a population boom, there is no definitive evidence to know how many polar bears there were "to begin with." One can't scientifically determine an end result with a variable starting point.
Polar Bears International asked Dr. Steven C. Amstrup, USGS polar bear project leader for 30 years the following question:
Q:...
7
In several articles I've found about it, climate change is only but one factor among several other which have contributed to the boom of jellyfish population. The increase of the jellyfish population, however, has been acknowledged in several places of the world, and it seems to be a global trend.
Jellyfish are booming because of:
Lack of predators due to ...
6
A decade ago, there were more captive tigers in China alone than wild tigers in the entire world. The same was true with the USA.
The 2016, the population estimate of wild tigers was 3890 (an increase from 2010).
Source: Scientific American Blog:
Today, at the 3rd Asia Ministerial Conference on Tiger Conservation, officials announced that the estimated ...
6
We have this from 2010:
https://www.manufacturing.net/news/2010/12/va-plant-produces-4b-drinking-straws-annually
(Facts as of print time for the article.) There's a plant in VA that produces annually about 4 billion of the little plastic bendy straws that come with juice boxes. It has more than 80% of the US market for bendy straws, and also exports to a ...
6
The energy saving is in not heating the water.
From the web-site of a random manufacturer:
How does it all work?
Your washing machine uses the most energy when it's heating up the water at the beginning of the wash cycle.
So Hotpoint's Eco Cycles simply don't heat up the water - that's how you can achieve fantastic energy savings of between 50% - ...
5
Wikipedia says,
Silent Spring was met with fierce opposition by chemical companies, but it spurred a reversal in national pesticide policy, led to a nationwide ban on DDT for agricultural uses,[2] and inspired an environmental movement that led to the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.[3][4]
Has the natural ecological cycle spread ...
5
776 species have gone extinct since year 1500 according to the most comprehensive global survey of threatened species, The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. The number of species that go extinct without anyone noticing may probably be large, but not 10,000 times as high as the number of species confirmed by IUCN.
Figures like "10,000 and 100,000 species ...
4
Short version
I cannot find any published research that specifically considers using 2 dogs vs. more than 2 dogs to hunt foxes. However, there is a substantial literature on the effect of fox hunting on fox populations in general. All the studies I found indicate that fox hunting with hounds generally has little to no effect on fox populations.
Long Version
...
4
You are presenting two claims in your question, please split it up appropriately. I will hereby address your second claim. Research from 1986 to 1997 indeed confirms that some pesticides and insecticides can indeed be found in breast milk:
Between summer 1995 and summer 1997 the median PCB concentration level was 0.502 mg/kg, the median DDT level 0.202 mg/...
3
You seem to be focusing on two specific claims made by the Yes light marketing material.:
touch and feel like 80 gsm
This claim is incredibly subjective, and therefore difficult to analyze objectively. It seems plausible, though, that 70gsm paper would have a "touch and feel" like that of 80gsm paper. In certain regards, all paper has a "touch and ...
2
According to The Green Book (2007):
Each year, Americans throw away 138 billion straws and stirrers
So, if coffee stirrers are included, that is 378 million per day.
A 29 May 1924 Pulp and Paper Magazine of Canada article says:
No other country, it is stated, can compete with the United States in the manufacture of artificial straws, and no ...
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