Sustainability

Tag Archives: decentralized economics

HOW A NOVEL WIRELESS TECHNOLOGY IS HELPING CONSERVE WILDLIFE, FIGHT POLLUTION, SAVE FARMERS MONEY AND MORE

Low-power wide-area networks — LPWANs — are finding application in everything from tracking rhinos in Tanzania to monitoring water quality in Ireland

The sun beats down on the dried Tanzanian soils. Dust is slowly settling back down to the ground in the wake of a parade of tourists’ vehicles, which are now disappearing over the horizon. It’s dry season in the Serengeti National Park, and safari trucks are groaning under the weight of excited visitors.

The park, a World Heritage Site, draws tourists from all over the world. Its ecosystem is carefully managed by hard-working park rangers — a delicate balancing act between wildlife promotion and preservation made even more daunting by poachers in pursuit of the endangered eastern black rhino.

Protecting rhinos from poachers has always been an integral part of park management. While it’s still a complicated and highly skilled endeavor, it’s been made a little easier thanks to recent advances in data communications technology. Using geolocation sensors implanted in the rhinos’ horns and novel wireless telecommunications technology known as a low-power wide-area network (LPWAN), rangers can track the Serengeti’s rhinos from a central location, then concentrate their surveillance efforts where the animals are at any given time.

 

How a novel wireless technology is helping conserve wildlife, fight pollution, save farmers money and more

Farming for a Small Planet

How we grow food determines who can eat and who cannot—no matter how much we produce.

People yearn for alternatives to industrial agriculture, but they are worried. They see large-scale operations relying on corporate-supplied chemical inputs as the only high-productivity farming model. Another approach might be kinder to the environment and less risky for consumers, but, they assume, it would not be up to the task of providing all the food needed by our still-growing global population.

Contrary to such assumptions, there is ample evidence that an alternative approach—organic agriculture, or more broadly “agroecology”—is actually the only way to ensure that all people have access to sufficient, healthful food. Inefficiency and ecological destruction are built into the industrial model.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/01/12/farming-small-planet

 

Top