Environment – Things Are Good

Amazon Bridge Saves Thousands of Lives

Aerial picture of a primate bridge being installed over a highway,

When humans build into areas where animals thrive there is inevitably an increase in harm done to the local population, but this harm can be managed and reduced in multiple ways depending on where the development is. In the Amazon they are installing bridges for monkeys and other animals to safely cross over the road instead of trying to run across the roadway. These bridges aren’t a new idea, they are plentiful in Costa Rica for example, so it’s easy to demonstrate how effective they are. That being said, local wildlife have their presences for style of bridge and locations so it’s vitally important to figure out the best bridge design and location. In Brazil they have now created a standard design that proves to be very effective in the country. With the standard approach it should be easier and cheaper to put up more bridges.

The bridges are part of a program involving Projeto Reconecta and the municipal government, along with local organizations and business owners who are eager to conserve the unique biodiversity of their town and promote ecotourism, but were alarmed by the growing number of wildlife-vehicle collisions.

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After years of working along Brazilian highways, the biologist had always sought a solution that was simple, low-cost and durable. The current bridge features a multilayer design that accommodates primates with different modes of locomotion — from species that rely on their prehensile tails to move through the canopy to brachiating species such as spider monkeys, which swing using their arms, both of which are common in the Amazon, as well as species that simply walk across the network of crossed ropes. It is worth noting that other small terrestrial mammals, including opossums, sloths and mouse opossums, have also been recorded using the bridges.

You Want to Live in a Dense Neighbourhood

View of downtown Toronto from a drone shot above U of T

Living densely is a good thing, more specifically being surrounded by density is a good thing. Where we live can have a huge impact on our collective well being and the planetary ecosystem. Low density housing like suburbs are really bad for one’s mental health and for your communities health. When it comes to greenhouse gas emissions it’s clear that we can drastically reduce by just increasing the density of our neighbourhoods, a simple solution with wide ranging and positive consequences.

Having homes close to one another is not only good for emissions from your house, it’s good a reducing other emission sources too. Dense neighbourhoods means you don’t need to drive to get a coffee, you can walk. The network impacts of density are quiet apparent when you live in a good place.

The results show that attached homes and MURBs are 45–62 % less GHG intensive per capita than detached homes. Considering results at the neighborhood level, GHG emissions per capita decrease with higher density. We also find negative associations between GHG emissions per capita and household characteristics including household size, tenancy, and household income. The findings of this study highlight the need to integrate built forms, mobility, and transport infrastructure when assessing the potential greenhouse gas emissions of housing and neighborhoods. Besides aiming for density, the provision of walkable neighborhoods, low-emission modes of transport, and high-density housing forms (e.g., multi-unit residential buildings) can lead to low-GHG neighborhoods.

Phytoplankton Can Save the Planet

ocean shore

When it comes to absorbing carbon you can do a lot worse than plankton. Yes, those tiny specks of flora that float around the ocean can take on a lot of carbon to thrive and grow, which means that we could use them as a reservoir of excess of carbon in the atmosphere. As we know, fossil fuels come from old plants and animals that died out millions of years ago and now we’re burning them for power, which is the biggest geoengineering project in history. A simple proposition is to reverse the process: supercharge the feeding of the phytoplankton to get them to grab the carbon and sequester it away.

To be clear the best way to deal with rising temperatures is to stop burning fossil fuels in the first place!

So we’re not talking about some wild new speculative hypothesis or an odd-ball observation from a single contested study. We’re talking about the accumulated output of hydrothermal cruises, dust-tracking satellites, floating ocean robots, sediment cores that reach back through ice ages, shipboard chemistry experiments, and decades of chlorophyll imagery. The core relationship — feed iron-starved water, and it grows more phytoplankton, in proportion to how much you feed it, and then stops when the nutrient addition stops — is about as well-established as anything in ocean science gets.

That last point deserves notice. Reversability is a key criterion for ecological safety. You want to be sure that if the intervention you’re pursuing turns out to have a negative effect, you can stop it. You wouldn’t want to risk shifting an ecosystem into a new permanent state. Here the evidence is especially clear. Phytoplankton grows as long as you keep feeding it. When you stop feeding it, it stops growing.

A Blender Can Improve Your Garden

A small vegetable garden is good for your health, your neighbourhood, your sense of self, and even your pocketbook. In many backyard gardens a simple composter is usually enough to refresh the soil and keep the plants happy. If you’re limited in space you can still make use of your kitchen scraps in a garden using the power of a blender. A household blender can speed up the decomposition process by chopping up food waste into a slurry that will quickly be consumed by all those nice little microbes. When you do this don’t go easy on the water and don’t dump all the slurry in one spot – spread it out for best results.

Blender compost can be made out of any blendable kitchen scraps that you’d normally throw into your compost pile, such as vegetable and fruit peels and cores, cooked pasta, eggshells, coffee grounds, and loose-leaf tea. If you don’t mind a bit more mess, you can also blend in premoistened paper towels, cut flowers, and dried autumn leaves. Just like with any compost, steer clear of blending meat or dairy waste, which attracts pests.

Using Dirt From Tunnels to Build New Stuff

picture of a tunnelling machine

Digging a subway means cutting through a lot of dirt, but what to do with it? This is the question that has troubled many construction sites throughout the years and depending on where you’re digging dirt you have different options. The worst, but all too common, option is to send the dirt to a landfill as ridiculous as that sounds. When Line 2 was being built in Toronto they used the dirt to build a whole new park and that approach is becoming popular the world over. Now Toronto is building a new subway and the dirt is being used in nifty ways too.

The hallmark for all cities to get to is the standard set by Paris.

Some global jurisdictions have pushed further into circular approaches that go beyond simple reuse. In France, large volumes of soil from metro construction projects have been integrated into systems designed to keep material within the local economy. Regional operators manage large-scale soil redistribution for parks, green spaces, and land restoration, creating a coordinated soil logistics network across Paris.

Paris’s proactive initiatives like Cycle Terre, carried out between 2018 and 2021, processed suitable excavated clay from the Grand Paris Express project into compressed earth blocks and other low-carbon building materials from a factory 10 kilometres from the excavation sites. This resulted in relatively short transport times and effectively turned soil into a construction input rather than a disposal burden. Ultimately, however, the initiative failed to generate enough commercial contracts and went into liquidation.