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Financial incentives are often cited as a means to get farmers to participate in conservation efforts. Pay them to not use toxic pesticides and they might make the shift. The problem is that a lot of solutions to improve conservation in agricultural areas require the cooperation of multiple different people to be effective. These were … Continue reading
There are so many stories about the conflict between wildlife and farmers. Each one is trying to make their living and their approaches aren’t always compatible. Burrowing animals create holes that animals like horses and cows can fall in and get injured. Predators can prey on animals on the farm. Herbivores can decimate crops. On … Continue reading
Failing forward has become a more common term in business settings. It is used to convey a situation where failure is seen as a learning opportunity that helps achieve success. As an educator, I’ve advocated for something similar for a number of years. I believe that failing or falling is part of learning. Unfortunately, at … Continue reading
Plastics are everywhere. For decades they’ve been cheap and disposable. But plastics are made mostly from crude oil. So between the impacts of the oil and the impacts of the waste plastics, particularly incinerating these wastes, release huge amounts of carbon dioxide. This makes plastic a huge issue for climate change. But, you might ask, … Continue reading
Ah, the charismatic megafauna, a curse and a solution. I don’t remember when I first learned this term. I can guarantee it was in an ecology course. Charismatic megafauna are animals, almost always mammals that conservationists think people will care about like bears or caribou. Instead of focusing conservation on improving the entire ecosystem, we … Continue reading
Collaborative note taking is an activity where students share the load of creating notes from a class or resource. They work in groups to identify key material, examples, etc and record these in a shared document. I’ve mainly seen this activity in relation to accessibility and inclusion. For some reason, a student may not be … Continue reading
As a bike commuter I really appreciate a lot of cycling infrastructure. Marked bike lanes are great, and separated paths are typically better, except for one giant caveat: intersections. I am always extra vigilant at intersections, but especially ones where I’m moving from a separated path across the intersection. It definitely feels like drivers don’t … Continue reading
QR codes are a type of barcode that can be read using a smartphone to, typically, open up a website where they can access more information through websites, photos, videos, etc or activities on different sites such as interactive quizzes or collaborative documents. They’ve become more popular in the last few years for a couple … Continue reading
Sugar substitutes like Stevia are generally promoted as a health choice. They are low or no calorie and are often significantly sweeter allowing people to use less. But while the health effects are continually the subject of research, the environmental impacts have been less well studied. Suckling and colleagues (2023) have attempted to address this … Continue reading
I’m a fan of open education resources (OER), which are “teaching, learning, and research resources that, through permissions granted by the copyright holder, allow others to use, distribute, keep, or make changes to them” (Aesoph, 2022). In fact, after becoming frustrated that I couldn’t find an appropriate OER for my introduction to sustainability course and … Continue reading
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