Ecotourism is often presented as the savior for wildlife and wild places — providing local communities with financial incentives to preserve nature while also reducing poaching and development pressure.
But, lately, others question whether rich Westerners jetting around the world really help much at all: They disturb animals, create demands for new development and only employ [...]

My husband returns to the same reefs every year in the Bahamas, where he has been teaching a coral reef ecology class for the last 14 years. On his 2008 trip, he noticed that the reef fish were missing. The culprits were quickly identified — and during his 2009 course, he and his students were [...]

It’s indeed a bright green morning today, with positive news everywhere: International Climate Day of Action a big success! Smart meters galore! And here’s the big news: a new study shows your personal actions can make a difference in the fight against climate change! Take that, all you climate change pessimists.

Bill McKibben says we need to “stop whining [...]

Some days you wake up and find everything you’re doing and believing is wrong — like eating tomatoes or thinking your fellow Americans trust the scientific consensus that man is causing climate change. This, ladies and gentlemen, is one of those days. But tomorrow is Climate Action Day, so…maybe slice a tomato and take [...]

You won’t see it in any headlines today, but let’s just give a quick shout-out to The Nature Conservancy for turning 58 today! Yep, that’s right, today is the day we were incorporated back in 1951. Times certainly have changed – greenhouse gas emissions, iPhone apps and wind farms are the topics du jour – but conservation is still as [...]

It seems that everything comes back to climate change… sudden aspen decline, Hurricane Katrina, the Patriots playing in the snow and more. Check it out in today’s round-up of Cool Green Morning news links.

According to a new poll, American voters still don’t think climate change should be high on the government’s agenda. The poll from Politico [...]

One of the difficulties writing for Cool Green Science is that our name necessarily constrains our subject matter. While we are all conservationists and hence prone to write on environmental topics most of the time, the occasional truly bizarre tangents into other issues that you’d get on a personal blog as the author meandered intellectually [...]

Salmon adapting to dams? Solar panels causing climate change? Optimistic conservationists? There is nothing wrong with your computer. Do not attempt to adjust your monitor. We are now in control of the transmission…here on the best darn roundup of daily cool green news ever:

The Royal Botanic Gardens in England announces that it’s collected seeds from [...]

Marijuana causes drought, endangered species are expensive, and wetlands store carbon… who knew? Now you do, thanks to this morning’s round-up of Cool Green News links.

New data suggest that wetlands could store six times more carbon per acre than forests, leading some scientists and companies to consider wetlands restoration as the next shining hope for carbon offsets.
How much [...]

Thirteen years ago, The Nature Conservancy teamed up with Fundación Amigos de la Naturaleza, American Electric Power Company, BP America and Pacificorp to buy out four logging concessions adjacent to Bolivia’s Noel Kempff Mercado National Park.
In addition to protecting almost 832,000 hectares of forest habitat and doubling the size of the national park, this purchase [...]