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Cities Can Save the Earth

The climate crisis won't be solved by changing light bulbs and inflating your tires more, planting a tree and driving a little less. It's going to require a truly fundamental shift in how we build our cities and live in them. The key to changing our cities involves the car. Cars dominate cities in the rich countries, and they are increasingly swamping poor countries as well.

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Popular Abroad, Kenyan Nobel Laureate Maathai Faces Challenges at Home

Wangari Maathai
Nairobi, Kenya - Though her status as the first and only woman from Africa to be awarded with the prestigious Noble Peace Prize offered the opportunity for a promising political career, the indomitable Professor Wangari Maathai has seen her grand plans falter. Maathai's ambitions to ascend to high political office continue to be challenged by a patriarchal society and populace that doesn't support her, believing she in not in touch with the everyday realities of Kenyan life.

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Diplomacy Underground: Tunnel Proposed to Grant Bolivia Access to Sea

Bachelet and Morales
In the bloody War of the Pacific in 1879, Chile took away Bolivia's only access to the sea. Over a century later, demands from Bolivia for the recuperation of this land are louder than ever. The most recently proposed solution to this diplomatic crisis seems to be straight out of a science fiction novel: the construction of 150 kilometer tunnel from Bolivia to an artificial island in the Pacific Ocean.

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Where Plastics Go to Kill

It's an oil spill. Only solid, and far more deadly. The average liquid spill of petroleum will kill marine life for a year, maybe 10. But it could take 400 years for that petroleum-based six-pack ring holding your beer to break down. Each year, undegraded plastic chokes to death some 100,000 whales, dolphins, seals, manatees, plus an unknown number of sea turtles and about 2 million birds. And once it has broken down, it becomes deadlier still.