Word: wetlands
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...permafrost is on dry land either. The East Siberian Arctic Shelf, a vast expanse of shallow seafloor off Russia's northeast coast, was once wetland as well. It was submerged as melting glaciers drove sea level up at the end of the last ice age, but it still contains methane-rich permafrost, which Shakhova believes may now be becoming unstable. The numbers are not alarmingly large, she agrees, but what is worrisome is that no leakage was expected here. (See TIME's special report on the environment...
...That's the motivation behind Global Green's sustainable-schools program, which will both retrofit existing schools to make them more energy-efficient and build entirely new classrooms from the ground up. The new schools will have solar panels, wetland habitats (which can act as a buffer for future storms) and rainwater cisterns. At Gentilly Terrace Elementary School, which is getting an energy overhaul, power bills should fall some $22,000 a year. In a city that is struggling to get back on its feet, those energy savings make a difference - as does the fact that some research has shown...
...others have shown, is in the indirect effects on land use: when an acre of land is used to grow fuel instead of food, an extra acre somewhere else is probably going to be converted into farmland to grow food. And that acre may well be an acre of wetland or forest that would otherwise store loads of carbon. So farm fuels become a lose-lose deal: exacerbating the deforestation that already creates one fifth of the world's carbon emissions, and driving up global food prices. (See pictures of the global food crisis...
...human population has grown in the Pantanal, the vast wetland in central Brazil, people and big cats - namely the South American jaguar - are encroaching increasingly on each other's territory. When conflict occurs, as it inevitably does, the cats are usually the ones who lose...
Even if Sidwell middle school isn't quite a wetland, it can still lay claim to being the greenest school in the U.S., becoming the first institution to earn a platinum rating from the U.S. Green Building Council, an architectural watchdog organization...