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In 1948, Norbert Wiener pondered a new science in his classic book Cybernetics, one that flirted with the "boundary regions of science." Sustainability today occupies a similar state, but the concept is used more as a policy guide and buzzword than as a true science. As policy, the Bruntland Report in 1987 defined sustainability as "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." Beyond this important sense of applied ethics, sustainability must also be approached as a discipline governed by the scientific method.

Reindeer in the arctic could face harder times in the future. Lester Graham reports researchers believe global warming might hurt their chances for survival: It’s not just reindeer, but caribou, muskox – the hoofed animals in the arctic. They eat lichen and moss when they can find it. Jaakkoo Putkonen is a researcher at the University of North Dakota. He and his team have studied the arctic herds. He says when it rains in the arctic… it freezes.

It has been dubbed the "rise of slime." Massive swarms of jellyfish are blooming from the tropics to the Arctic, from Peru to Namibia to the Black Sea to Japan, closing beaches and wiping out fish, either by devouring their eggs and larvae, or out-competing them for food. To draw attention to the spread of "jellytoriums," the National Science Foundation in the U.S. has produced a report documenting that the most severe damage is to fish: In the Sea of Japan, for example, schools of Nomurai jellyfish - 500 million strong and each more than two metres in diameter - are clogging fishing nets, killing fish and accounting for at least $20-million in losses.

WASHINGTON - The U.S. economy shrank in the summer, corporate profits fell and consumer spending had its worst showing in 28 years even before the financial crisis struck with full force. The economy shrank in the summer and corporate profits were falling even before the financial crisis struck with full force. Analysts are forecasting that those small declines will be followed by much larger decreases this quarter as the longest recession in a quarter century gains intensity.

Is that laundry soap truly "environmentally friendly"? Was that mattress treated with toxic chemicals? Is that sweatsuit fashioned from organic cotton? Is that lipstick "natural"? California officials launched a sweeping green initiative on Tuesday to inform consumers exactly how hundreds of thousands of products sold in the state are manufactured and transported and how safe their ingredients are.

SAN FRANCISCO, California — Saturn's tiny moon Enceladus may be one of the best candidates for extraterrestrial life in our solar system. Scientists for the first time have gathered comprehensive evidence suggesting Enceladus may have all the necessary ingredients to harbor life in the ocean beneath its icy crust.

More than 2 trillion tons of land ice in Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska have melted since 2003, according to new NASA satellite data that show the latest signs of what scientists say is global warming. More than half of the loss of landlocked ice in the past five years has occurred in Greenland, based on measurements of ice weight by NASA's GRACE satellite, said NASA geophysicist Scott Luthcke. The water melting from Greenland in the past five years would fill up about 11 Chesapeake Bays, he said, and the Greenland melt seems to be accelerating.

A new agency to be launched next month (26 January) in Bonn, Germany, aims to promote a swift transition towards the use of renewable energy worldwide. The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), which was initially driven by Denmark, Germany and Spain, will be the first worldwide agency solely dedicated to promoting renewable energy, acting as the "voice of renewable energy", according to its website.

KABUL (Reuters) - President George W. Bush said on Monday an announcement on a auto industry rescue was not imminent, leaving the industry's fate clouded in uncertainty for a little longer. "We're not quite ready to announce that yet," Bush told reporters on Air Force One during a flight from Baghdad on an unannounced visit to Afghanistan.

[POZNAN] Some of the world's poorest countries have been hampered in their attempts to attend the UN climate change negotiations in Poznan, Poland because of difficulties obtaining visas. Lead negotiators, journalists and civil society representatives from developing countries — those most vulnerable to climate change — were delayed, or could not attend the two-week long meeting.

Around 250 live Asian Elephants have been smuggled from Myanmar in the past decade, mostly destined for “elephant trekking” tourism activities in neighbouring Thailand, a new report by the wildlife trade monitoring network TRAFFIC reveals today. Meanwhile blatant illegal ivory trade continues in Myanmar, with TRAFFIC surveys of 14 markets and three border markets in Thailand and China finding 9,000 pieces of ivory and 16 whole tusks for sale.

About this time every decade, the U.S. begins to hanker for the next great national self-portrait. That old still life that told us who we were -- magnificent as it once was in scope and detail -- has grown dusty and is ready for the closet. It's the time when the Census Bureau begins mustering the army of enumerators and tabulators who will reach across the country to tally us up in all our dynamism and diversity.

In a few hundred thousand years, after all weather effects of 21st century climate change have disappeared from the earth's surface, after our quietly smoldering nuclear waste has been extinguished, two destructive impacts traceable to George Bush's policies will yet remain. The first is extinctions. Species that have died out, including the subset resulting from Bush's environmental policies, will forever deprive our evolving biosphere of their contribution.

vANCOUVER -- British Columbia has become a last refuge for a growing number of species in North America, but if the "biodiversity ark" is to be maintained in the face of global warming, government will have to change the way it manages the environment.

After 10 years of living in African refugee camps and two years in a one-bedroom apartment, Baja Dalla and his family soon will have a house they can call their own. Next March, Mr. Dalla, his wife, Nyanchi, and three small children will move to one of the first Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design-certified Habitat for Humanity homes in the world on East 19th Street in the Jefferson Heights area, Jeff Cannon with GreenSpaces said at a news conference Monday.

I am a social worker, not an economist, and what I know is this: The stock market is in free fall, financial organizations are being bailed out and the Detroit automakers might yet get financial help from Washington, D.C. But what about those of us in the nonprofit world? Where's our bailout?

London, Dec 1 : Scientists have determined that due to a dramatic loss of sea-ice in the Arctic during the summer of 2007, convective mixing in the North Atlantic Ocean, a mechanism that helps to remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere, has returned after a decade of near stagnation.

Enormous cave bears, Ursus spelaeus, that once inhabited a large swathe of Europe, from Spain to the Urals, died out 27,800 years ago, around 13 millennia earlier than was previously believed, scientists have reported. The new date coincides with a period of significant climate change, known as the Last Glacial Maximum, when a marked cooling in temperature resulted in the reduction or loss of vegetation forming the main component of the cave bears' diet.

The air is so unhealthy in parts of California that it causes the state to lose $28 billion in economic activity each year, says a study by two economics professors at California State University, Fullerton. Pollutants also cause more than 3,800 people to die prematurely.

Efficient jeans are still hard to find. Conventionally grown cotton requires more pesticides to grow than any other crop. The more efficient method is to grow organic cotton or hemp. The surf company Reef makes some good organic cotton jeans, like their Heritage Jean