pests

Urban Transformations: In Pune, India, Waste Pickers Go from Trash to Treasure

5 years ago World Resources Institute 0 Comments

Pinky Sonawane spent her childhood gathering garbage on the streets of Pune, India. She’d join her mother in pulling plastic bottles, cans, and cardboard from roadside dumpsters, selling the materials to scrap traders for income. With no organized waste-collection system in the city of 4 million people, there was plenty of waste for her to pick—it filled bins, littered streets and piled up in mountainous heaps in dumps. But Sonawane and others like her were often treated like the garbage they collected.

The Link Between Climate Change & Invasive Species Pest Plagues

6 years ago James Ayre 0 Comments

With increased global trade, the spread of so-called invasive pest species has increased greatly over the last few hundred years. While long-distance trade has long been a feature of civilizations and cultures the world over, something that has changed somewhat in recent times has been the cheapness and speed at which it can occur — a situation that is almost entirely due the exploitation of fossil fuel reserves (and before that unsustainable deforestation of very old-growth tree stands).