A solar-powered airplane finished crossing the United States on Saturday, landing in New York City after flying over the Statue of Liberty during its historic bid to circle the globe, the project team said. The spindly, single-seat experimental aircraft, dubbed Solar Impulse 2, arrived at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport at about 4 a.m. local time after it took off about five hours beforehand at Lehigh Valley International Airport in Pennsylvania, the team reported on the airplane's website. Such a pleasure to land in New York! For the 14th time we celebrate sustainability," said the project's co-founder Andre Borschberg on Twitter after flying over the city and the Statue of Liberty during the 14th leg of the trip around the globe. The Swiss team flying the aircraft in a campaign to build support for clean energy technologies hopes eventually to complete its circumnavigation in Abu Dhabi, where the journey began in March 2015. The solar cr...
Adventures in the Anthropocene is her record of the people and places she encountered on a huge global tour. The book details how humans are altering the planet, but it also tells the stories of how we are learning to limit and cope with that change. The Royal Society Winton Prize is worth £25,000 to the winner. "Anthropocene" is the word used by many scientists to describe the epoch of humanity's profound influence on the Earth. There are arguments over when our activities started to distort natural processes, but there is no doubting the effects today.
Pollution, species loss, over-exploitation of water and mineral resources, and of course climate change. The list goes on. This is "the age we made".Gaia knew all the data from her job as a science reporter, but she wanted to see the impacts first-hand. So, she put on hold the nine-to-five existence and bought a one-way ticket to Kathmandu, to start a personal odyssey and directly sample some of the global upheaval. She expected to be gone no more than six months, but two-and-a-half years later, she and her backpack were still travelling and still talking to people about their experiences. Adventures in the Anthropocene is not simply a book of doom and gloom. It has many inspiring characters.
These are the individuals with bottom-up approaches to meeting the particular challenges they are facing - like the man making his own glaciers in the Indian Himalayas to store water for his neighbours, or the Belize man who has built an island habitat out of rubbish that he's collected from the sea. "I really wanted it to be an optimistic book, because I'm an optimist; because we are incredible, we are ingenious, we are this resourceful species," she told me."So, yes, although we've put ourselves in this position, and are reaching all sorts of crises in various different ways in terms of food, water, energy, etc - we're also very capable of turning things around. "I met incredible people all around the world who are already doing things for themselves.
"They're not waiting for someone in Berkeley, or Yale, or Oxford to come up with amazing solutions (although perhaps that's where the solutions will come from); they're also coming from the people who are living in conflict with our massive changes. We need to learn from them." You can listen to Gaia talk about her book in the audio interview at the top of the page.
The four episodes (1, 2, 3, and 4) can also be downloaded as podcasts.
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