Articles by Sarah Laskow

Stop breathing! You’re putting us into debt

Starting next week, everything you eat, breathe, use, and touch will put you further in debt to the planet. Each year, humans consume more resources than the planet can produce, putting us into "ecological debt" to the planet. 

Unlike monetary debt, this over-budget spending can't be forgiven or wiped away. 

Critical List: Britain’s new shale gas bonanza; 48 hours in a box, with plants

British people now have a greater stake in fighting against hydrofracking: turns out their country has a lot of shale gas.

Luckily, though, they live in Europe, where gas executives admit that, at the very least, drilling should become safer.

The U.S. could be the biggest market for solar power in the world.

Nuclear plant’s pollution will never, ever be cleaned up

If you got all warm and fuzzy reading our previous post about the revitalization of the Howe Sound, and if you want to keep that feeling, don't read this post. Because it is the exact opposite story, one in which humans mess up the environment and can never, ever take it back.

In Scotland, from 1963 to 1984, a nuclear plant leaked lethal-if-ingested radioactive waste. That waste got all over beaches and other lovely sea-side resources. A while back, the Scottish version of the EPA recommended that someone make this right and return the area to a "pristine condition."

But now, they're giving up.

Once a wasteland, Howe Sound comes back to life

Humans can royally muck up the environment, but sometimes we can put things right again. Seven years ago, Vancouver's Howe Sound was a lifeless chemical stew, poisoned by contamination from a copper mine. And now, according to the Globe and Mail, there's this:

Sightings of grey whales, killer whales and schools of hundreds of white-sided dolphins are now being made regularly in the Sound, where massive herring spawns are once again occurring. “We are seeing the revitalization of an entire ecosystem. It is really uplifting,” said John Buchanan, a Squamish conservationist who voluntarily walks streams in the area to help count spawning salmon.

And this: