There are numerous steps that a homeowner can take to save money on regular expenses. When it comes to decreasing the water bill, however, it may seem difficult to make a big impact on this expense. Installing low-flow toilets and faucets can have some impact, but it may seem rather nominal on a month by month basis. When you want to make a bigger impact and really see a large difference in your water bill, you want to use water tanks to recycle water for substantial savings.  Continue Reading

Nature is the best mother that the world can turn to when the other artificial means of productivity prove difficult. One of the best ways to tap the wealth of nature is through biodiversity measures towards a friendly environment while doing secure production activities. There are a number of economic values of biodiversity as discussed below:

Source of food

Biodiversity is a very probable way of generating enough food for the ever increasing human population. The world needs to domesticate more animal species and crops as a way of increasing food supply. Wild species of both animals and plants are very resistant to adverse weather conditions. This minimizes the losses that farmers incur incase of less rainfall and instead increases food as well as animal productivity. It is the high time to counter the rampant occurrences of hunger by adopting biodiversity. Continue Reading

Watch this video on helping the world by preserving biodiversity

The term “biodiversity” is relatively new, conceived in 1985 by merging two words – biological diversity. At the symposium in 1986 after the publication of the book “Biodiversity” (Wilson 1986), whose editor was biologist EO Wilson, accepted the use of the word and its concepts. But why are we interested in the term biodiversity? The answer is simple. In recent decades the world has begun to growingly lose species and habitats at an alarming rate. Why? This was mostly due to human activities. It is very difficult to answer the question how many species we lost. Specifically, we do not really know the final number of species that exist on the planet, because new species are found every day.

Biodiversity is different for given ecosystems, and it is important to conserve biological diversity at the highest levels in the ecosystems. Biodiversity is something that we should not be playing with because biodiversity is 4 billion years of the evolution of numerous species. We should remember that one thing is for sure and that is that nature knows best, as unlike us humans, nature has time and the experience to make the things as they must be. Continue Reading

Are you energy efficient? What else is there, and that will help you keep the money in your wallet and simultaneously contribute to the reduction of environmental pollution?

Most of today’s energy that we need for life in the 21st century we still get from non-renewable sources, mainly from fossil fuels. It took millions of years to occur oil, gas and coal but today we consume them rapidly.

In addition,the production of energy from these fuels pollutes the air;this is due to a variety of hazardous substances such as gas, carbon dioxide, CO2, which (along with methane) contribute to warming of the atmosphere and the climate change phenomenon. Continue Reading

Kapok trees and rain forests can launch numerous educational, interesting activities for school projects, homeschooling units or just for fun. There is an abundance of materials applicable to kapok trees and rain forests, such as research topics, writing assignments, stories and hands-on activities.

Share a Story

Lynne Cherry’s book “The Great Kapok Tree: A Tale of the Amazon Rain Forest” is centered around a young man who travels to the forest with his ax in order to chop down trees. Cherry’s story features exquisite illustrations, and it creatively delivers an excellent message about eco-responsibility. This book is the winner of the International Reading Association Teacher’s Choice Award and the Charlotte Award.

Create a Lapbook

A lapbook is a cost-effective educational tool that can serve as the basis of a multifaceted, detailed project. In order to make a lapbook about kapok trees and the rain forests, several items can be placed inside of a file folder, like a kapok tree booklet, folded world map with rain forests marked, rain forest animal flashcards in an envelope and a rain forest layers flip book.

Cultivate Budding Activists

Inspired children can become rain forest advocates. Have the children create posters about rain forest protection and preservation. They can also make postcards to send to friends and family about the importance of rain forest conservation. For computer-based activities, children can build a website page or blog about the subject with links to rain forest preservation charities.

Give a Writing Assignment

Give the children a writing/research assignment regarding the use of kapok trees in cultures across the East Indies, Africa and the Americas. Or assign a comparison paper about temperate rain forests versus tropical rain forests. For creative writing assignments, students can write a note to the main character in “The Great Kapok Tree,” explaining the reason why he does not want to chop down the trees.

Biodiversity is, as far as science can tell, one of the most unique aspects of Earth as a planet. While astronomers hope to find Earthlike planets out in the galaxy, as far as Earth’s solar system is concerned, it contains all of the biodiversity orbiting the Sun. Continue Reading

Biodiversity is the variation of life forms within a given ecosystem, or on Earth more generally. Maintaining biodiversity is important for many reasons, not least of which are the many direct benefits to humankind. Biodiversity tends to be closely tied in the popular imagination with philosophical or purely environmentalist ethics, but there are a number of very practical reasons to support biodiversity conservation. Continue Reading

Biodiversity can have three general meanings. (see http://www.usaid.gov/our_work/environment/biodiversity/ for more information) First, it can be used to describe the complexity of biological species that populate a specific ecosystem. At a macro level, biodiversity is influenced by the natural environmental features found within an ecosystem. These features may include lakes, oceans, forests, mountains, deserts, and swamps. Within these macro-environmental features there usually exists overlapping or distinct micro-ecosystems. Continue Reading