Blogs & Ecology

Image by M. Betti and WaterAid

Don't laugh, this is serious. Did you know that 40% of the world's population, 2.6 billion people, don't have access to a toilet. To raise awareness of this global sanitation crisis and to celebrate a humble yet essential bathroom fixture, World Toilet Day is being proclaimed today, November 19. WaterAid has launched this campaign because without clean water and separate toilet facilities, diseases such as diarrhoea spread and affect children--5,000 a day die from illness related to poor sanitation.

Image source: Spink Shreves Galleries Inc.

Bill Gross, Wall Street money manager, recently auctioned off another portion of his British Empire Stamp collection and donated all proceeds to the Millennium Villages Project. Stamps range in estimated value from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of dollars and include rare stamps such as the Indigo Blue shade two-pence stamp of Mauritius; a trial printing "square pair" of 1863 Cape of Good Hope triangular-shaped, carmine red, mint-condition, one-penny denomination stamps; and an 1866 Dominica six pence stamp. The auction brought in $1,491,385 USD....

Photo via Gizmag

Clean water in disaster areas and developing nations is a major element in being able to deal with improvements. An ingenious use of shipping containers and waste water treatment methods is helping to make clean water and waste treatment easier than ever.

Image source: Getty Images

The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the Oxford University School of Geography and Environment just released Climate Change Country Profiles. The website includes a database with information on climate observations and multi-model projections for 52 developing countries. Information on each country includes a set of maps and diagrams which display the currently observed climate in the country and the projected climate for the country. ...

Photo via Symmetry Magazine

The above map shows the densities of Internet connectivity around the world. It’s easy to see which countries are most connected, and which are left in the dark. And with this we can fairly easily figure out what areas of the world lack the technologies that give us the luxuries we experience in daily life.

Once again, the call for international entries is out for the Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy, due October 21, 2008. If you don’t know much about the Ashden Awards, these prestigious prizes are given out every year to innovative entrepreneurs and organizations developing local sustainable energy projects in developing nations. Entry is free, with up to seven winners receiving £20,000 each in prize money for project development, and one Energy Champion awarded £40,000 – there’s even a documentary film that will be made about the winning projects.

Photo via Red Ferret

How I didn’t hear about this sooner, I’ll never know. Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway, went into water filtration awhile back.

Apparently this year he has unveiled the Slingshot, a filtration system for turning any water-containing liquid, including pee, into drinkable water. Not only that, but it can be run on cow poo.

The type of water conditions these programs are attempting to address, photo: McKay Savage.

photo: Pierre Holtz for UNICEF | hdptcar.net

For every pair of TOMS sold, another pair is given away to a child in need. Blake Mycoskie used to think he’d make as much money as possible in life and then give it all away. But now he figures he’ll just do business and help the world at the same time. ::TreeHugger Radio

Listen to the podcast of this interview via iTunes, or just click here to listen, right-click to download.

If you have an entrepreneurial itch, a love of shoes, or a distaste for poverty, Blake Mycoskie, the creator of TOMS, is someone you should know about. In an odd twist, Blake took the favored footwear of Argentine peasants and sparked a hipster shoe meme, transmitted by word of mouth. In our interview, Blake tells us about how TOMS got started, what comes next, and what it takes to hand-place thousands of shoes on children’s feet. ::TreeHugger Radio

Fishermen in Kerala, India photo: Ron Layters

Image source: World of Good.com

So. You've been reading Treehugger for years. You know everything there is to know about green. You probably know what we're going to post even before we do. In that case, you're probably up for the Smart Cart Quiz Challenge. Brought to you by the new World of Good.com Marketplace by Ebay, The Smart Cart Quiz shows consumers how they can "vote" with their almighty dollar.

Clearly the United States (with roughly 23% of global CO2 emissions has some 'splainin to do when it comes to carbon dioxide emissions, so don't get us wrong, we aren't trying to pass the buck. Yet, we did want to take a look at just how large the impact of CO2 emissions is from the developing world. The rankings below are only targeting human produced (anthropogenic) CO2 emissions, and do not include the other, toxic greenhouse gas emissions. If you look at greenhouse gases overall, then this list changes slightly.

Image source: author.

Bucking the tide of many developing nations, South Africa has chosen to set a limit on its greenhouse-gas emissions and to increase its use of renewable energy sources. South Africa's Environment Minister, Marthinus van Schalkwyk, said the country has a target to "stabilize" emissions by 2020 to 2025, "with absolute reductions in emissions...to begin ten years after growth was halted."