Before launching a campaign to raise funds for breast cancer awareness in New Haven this month, Maggie Thomas ’15 M.E.M. and four other Yale students did their homework.
Their plan was to ask restaurants and bars across the city to add meals or drinks to their menus calling attention to the disease, as part of Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Before making their pitches, they filled a spreadsheet with their negotiation questions, tailored for each business. (They asked one restaurant, for instance, “Would you consider putting a ‘boobie burger’ on your menu?”) If the initial pitch didn’t go well, they had a second question ready. And a third.
It turns out they didn’t need a spreadsheet. “In every restaurant we started by asking our most ridiculous question —…
Before graduating from F&ES last month, Gao Yufang M.E.Sc. ’14 focused his studies on the global ivory trade, with an emphasis on the complex role of his native China.
Gao — who will return to China this month, along with two African conservationists, to explore the country’s ivory markets — recently spoke with National Geographic about the complexities of the ivory market and the role of young people in curbing the slaughter of Africa’s elephants.
He also talks about why he decided to focus on this issue in the first place.
When I came to Yale in September 2012, everyone was talking about ivory trade. As a Chinese in the U.S. who understood how the conservation community in China works, I was seeing a great gap in…
Two years ago, Paul Anastas returned to Yale after a stint with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), where he served as Assistant Administrator for the Office of Research and Development.
So when the EPA today unveiled a new plan to curb carbon dioxide emissions from existing power plants, it was particularly meaningful for Anastas, a professor of chemistry at F&ES and director of the Center for Green Chemistry and Green Engineering.
In one of the most significant climate policy initiatives in U.S. history, the EPA introduced a draft rule that officials say would cut carbon dioxide emissions from existing coal plants by as much as 30 percent by 2030, compared with 2005 levels.
In a statement, Anastas called it “a great day for our children…
Earth Day arrived early on Science Hill today as students and staff members from across campus joined the F&ES Environmental Stewardship Committee and the Yale Grounds crew in planting native wildflowers along Whitney Avenue.
The day-long planting project is part of the larger “Urban Meadows” initiative at Yale that promotes biodiversity, improved air quality, reduced stormwater runoff, and a more beautiful campus and city.
The flowers are being planted along a berm located between Edwards Street and the Peabody Museum of Natural History.
“The berm is a very visible strip of land that ties one of New Haven’s biggest avenues to an area of Yale that for many years was just an unsightly parking lot,” said Lisa Fernandez, assistant director of the Yale Project on Climate…
During the mid-19th century, the passenger pigeon was the most abundant bird species in North America, if not the world, with a population believed to number in the billions.
Traveling in formations that might be impossible to imagine today, the bird was ubiquitous across New England, the Midwest and parts of Canada, darkening the skies over major cities and sometimes halting human activity in its tracks with the roar of hundreds of millions of flapping wings, says author Joel Greenberg, author of the new book A Feathered River Across the Sky: The Passenger Pigeon’s Flight to Extinction. In 1860, a British soldier in Ontario recorded a flock whose passage overhead lasted 14 hours.
“Forty years later, they were gone from the wild. Fourteen years after that they were…
In 2009, Beth Tellman M.E.Sc. ’14 moved to El Salvador to study the food sovereignty of organic coffee farmers. But after devastating floods and mudslides killed hundreds of people, and left thousands more homeless, her area of focus shifted quickly. In addition to working closely on community disaster resilience, Tellman began exploring how improved land use and forest management can provide a critical ecosystem service in places like El Salvador.
In an article for SNAP magazine (Science for Nature and People), Tellman documents the increasingly dire threats faced by the Latin American country in the face of environmental degradation and climate change, and how investing in natural systems could provide vital social and ecological benefits.
Conservation needs to grapple with what climate change is and will do to…
Earlier this year, a group of F&ES students traveled down the I-95 corridor, from New York to Washington, to explore how four major cities are using “green infrastructure” to handle storm water runoff. In each city they received an important piece of advice: Just get projects built.
“What all these cities helped us understand was the importance of getting projects in the ground, just to see how they function in your own city,” said Caitlin Feehan M.E.M. ’14, who helped organize the research trip.
This week, the students can say they’ve helped New Haven put its own project in the ground. The research they conducted as part of their class, F&ES 963: Payments for Ecosystem Services, helped inspire plans for new green projects in the Elm…
During the week of the Thanksgiving holiday, the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication (YPCCC) found an effective way to generate a buzz in the global climate debate: Add a hashtag.
More than 2,600 Twitter users responded to the YPCCC’s challenge to give “#ClimateThanks” on the popular social media site, posting nearly 8,000 tweets about individuals and groups making a difference in the climate fight. Those tweets generated more than 25 million timeline deliveries, and reached more than 7.2 million unique followers.
Participants included high-profile climate scientists, U.S. lawmakers, journalists, non-governmental organizations and thousands of individuals who simply care about climate issues.
“All in all, the campaign far exceeded our expectations,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. “I was…
When it comes to the state of the climate, there are plenty of reasons for concern. But there are also reasons for gratitude, the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication says.
This Thanksgiving week, the F&ES-based group is using Twitter to call attention to the people and organizations making a difference in the climate fight – and asking others to do the same.
They’re calling it #ClimateThanks.
“With friends and colleagues across the climate community, we are taking a moment to tweet or post who or what we are thankful for in the fight for a safe climate,” the group wrote on its website. “Please Tweet #ClimateThanks and help us raise awareness about the amazing things people are doing and build a stronger…
When I arrived on campus as a Yale freshman, I couldn’t believe how much history was all around me. It was crazy to think about how much younger my home state is than my university. When California was admitted to the union in 1850, Yale University had already existed for over a hundred years. Walking on the New Haven Green wasn’t a typical stroll in the park. That space had served as the main burial ground for the residents of New Haven for the city’s first 150 years. Last October, a tree on the Green fell during the peak of Hurricane Sandy, unearthing a skull that dates back to the late 1700s.
If the Green used to be a cemetery, what other common features within the city held…
