Word: wetlands
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
Flat strips of lush, submerged grass rise in terraces from the courtyard of Sidwell Friends' new middle school in Washington like rice paddies in a mountainous Chinese village. Part of a man-made wetland connected to the school's water system, the plants filter liquid waste, just as real wetlands do with rainwater. It's an engineering marvel, but Sidwell student Patricia Solleveld, 15, doesn't want you to get the wrong idea. "It doesn't smell at all," she says. Not only that, says Alejandro Alderman, 14, but the wastewater filtered through the wetland is clean enough to drink...
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...