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Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
US believers going green, hold media fast for Lent
Virginie Montet, AFP
From giving up their cars to abandoning their Facebook pages, many US Christians are being called on to help reduce global warming and turn their backs on Internet distractions over Lent.
“It’s an insult to God, it’s a sin to spoil the environment, to hurt creation,” said Episcopalian pastor Reverend Sally Bingham, who is coordinating “The Regeneration Project,” an interfaith group of some 4,000 congregations looking for a religious response to global warming.
(4 April 2009)
Crawling the Web to Foretell Ecosystem Collapse
Alexis Madrigal, Wired
The Interwebs could become an early warning system for when the web of life is about to fray.
By trawling scientific list-serves, Chinese fish market websites, and local news sources, ecologists think they can use human beings as sensors by mining their communications.
“If we look at coral reefs, for example, the Internet may contain information that describes not only changes in the ecosystem, but also drivers of change, such as global seafood markets,” said Tim Daw, an ecologist at the UK’s University of East Anglia in a press release about his team’s new paper in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.
The six billion people on Earth are changing the biosphere so quickly that traditional ecological methods can’t keep up. Humans, though, are acute observers of their environments and bodies, so scientists are combing through the text and numbers on the Internet in hopes of extracting otherwise unavailable or expensive information. It’s more crowd mining than crowd sourcing.
Much of the pioneering work in this type of Internet surveillance has come in the public health field, tracking disease. Google Flu Trends, which uses a cloud of keywords to determine how sick a population is, tracks epidemiological data from the Centers for Disease Control. Less serious projects — like this map of a United Kingdom snowstorm based on Tweets about snow — have also had some success tracking the real world.
(23 March 2009)
Grist Launches New Website in Honor of 10th Anniversary
Press release, Grist
SEATTLE — Celebrating its decade-long success as the nation’s leading source for online environmental news and information, Grist today announced the launch of a newly redesigned website.
“We think of the new website as Grist’s 10th Anniversary present to its users,” said Chip Giller, Grist founder and CEO. “For more than a decade we’ve been serving up award winning environmental journalism spiked with a healthy dose of humor and irreverence. With the release of the new site, that same great content will be wrapped in a design that is fun, easier to navigate, and more customizable.”
While maintaining the editorial tone and levity that users have come to expect, Grist’s redesigned website includes a number of important enhancements in functionality and interface, aimed at making it more engaging and easier to navigate. The new site is better organized, more customizable, and more interactive.
Improvements include the following:
• Top news stories will now be easier to find; topic pages and sorting features will help users quickly locate the content areas they care most about, including politics, climate and energy, food, business, living green, and more.
• Increased use of video content, like GristTV’s Ask Umbra, will add texture and context to the site, supplementing written news and feature stories on a more frequent basis.
• Users will be able to customize their Grist experience more than ever, with tools enabling them to follow their favorite writers, stories, and topics.
• The new site will also encourage and promote user action and engagement — helping users get involved, connect, and speak up through personal profile pages.
Grist editors expect to make further technical and design improvements to the site in the coming months, including the launch of new user forums and other features, based on user comments.
About Grist
With a fresh spin on environmental news and views, Grist informs, inspires, and links America’s next generation of green citizens. Founded in April 1999, Grist has developed the most recognizable voice in environmental journalism: funny, opinionated, and intelligent. Grist offers in-depth reporting, news analysis, opinions, and practical advice — all tailored to inform, entertain, provoke, and encourage its users to think creatively about environmental problems and solutions.
Each month, Grist reaches more than 800,000 unique individuals through its website and e-mails, and it has enjoyed particular success among readers in their 20s and 30s. Through partnerships with major media outlets such as MSN, The Huffington Post, The Washington Post, and Yahoo!, Grist is reaching an even broader audience that extends into the millions. Grist has been featured in The New York Times, Newsweek, Time, Vanity Fair, and dozens of other major media outlets worldwide, and was recently ranked as a top green website by both Time and The London Guardian.
(6 April 2009)
Good luck to the Grist team with their new website. The site has been improving their coverage of energy in the past few years, and even mentions peak oil from time to time.
I’d become accustomed to the old face of Grist, and was most interested in the discussion forums (Gristmill). The new site looks slicker and feels noisier – but we’ll probably get used to it. As a journalist I prefer content to flashy graphics and color.
The press release is posted online here. -BA
