“ In 1952, Thomas Eisner, a graduate student at Harvard, drove around North America for two months with a fellow student, Edward O. Wilson, to see the country and its insects. For the past half century, Dr. Eisner, now an emeritus professor at Cornell, continued his travels in the fields of entomology, evolutionary biology, chemical ecology and conservation. Some of his best-known research was on the explosive chemical outburst of the bombardier beetle, which he and his colleagues analyzed and photographed.”

Eye-Catching Images of Nature

“ Analysis of the human footprint map indicates that 83% of the land's surface is influenced by one or more of the following factors: human population density greater than 1 person per square kilometer, within 15 km of a road or major river, occupied by urban or agricultural land uses, within 2 km of a settlement or a railway, and/or producing enough light to be visible regularly to a satellite at night. 98% of the areas where it is possible to grow rice, wheat or maize (according to FAO estimates) are similarly influenced.”

“ The last of the wild represent the largest, least influenced areas (defined as above) in all the biomes of the world in all the world's regions. They represent a practical starting place for long-term conservation, places where the full range of nature may still exist with a minimum of conflict with existing human structures.”

Wildlife Conservation Society

CIESIN

“ The very thing that makes plastic items useful to consumers, their durability and stability, also makes them a problem in marine environments. Around 100 million tonnes of plastic are produced each year of which about 10 percent ends up in the sea. About 20 percent of this is from ships and platforms, the rest from land.”

• Trashing the Oceans
• North Pacific Gyre
• The trash vortex
• Trashed

On Nature: Sun helps clean the sky

“ The cleaning agent responsible is the hydroxyl radical (denoted OH), which is created when ultraviolet radiation splits apart a molecule of ozone to produce oxygen atoms that subsequently react with water. The resulting hydroxyl radicals are highly active and quickly react with trace atmospheric gases, such as the pollutant carbon monoxide, which is rapidly turned into carbon dioxide.”