Canon's Big Fat Green Scholarships

What would $78,000 do for your graduate education? That is how much Canon U.S.A. just awarded to each of eight doctoral candidates in the fields of conservation, environmental science and park management.

A decade ago, the U.S. arm of the Japanese imaging company established the Canon National Parks Science Scholars program to conduct research on conservation and sustainability in national parks in the Americas. According to Canon, the scholars picked for the program have done research in more than 85 national parks and published more than 340 scientific papers.

Five of this year's scholars hail from four U.S. colleges and universities--the University of Montana, Rutgers University, Cornell University, Oregon State University--and the others study at University of Alberta and McMaster University in Canada, and the Universidad Austral de Chile in Valdivida, Chile.

For more about the Canon National Parks Science Scholars program, check out Canon's Web site.

Focus Your School On 'Focus The Nation'

Assign the color green to January 31, 2008 on your Google calendar: That's the date for "Focus The Nation".

Think of it as a teach-in on global warming. The non-profit group behind "Focus The Nation" says it has already signed up more than 1,100 colleges and universities across the U.S., as well as high schools and middle schools. The idea is to drop every other subject for the day, and spend 24 hours brainstorming about environmental change. Here's how it will play out at one school, Alfred University in upstate New York: There will be a panel discussion on global warming solutions, an art and essay contest (on recycled paper) and a screening of "The 11th Hour", the environmental movie narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio. Alfred offers a major and minor in environmental studies for undergraduates.

To find out whether your school is already "focused", check here. If it hasn't yet pulled together an agenda, don't despair. The Web site for "Focus The Nation" has a model of how the day could be structured, and offers a way to sign up for a Webcast called "The 2% Solution". That's a reference to how much we need to cut emissions levels per year for the next 40 years to hold global warming to a minimum.

It's going to be interesting to see what comes from a day of collective brainpower.

Students Have A Seat At Bali Climate Talks

Sure, you can study the Kyoto Protocol negotiations in that lecture hall across the quad, but what if you had a chance to be part of them?

This news story says quite a few students are doing just that right now in Bali, where United Nations delegates are meeting on Kyoto's Clean Development Mechanism. The CDM, depending on your viewpoint, is either a novel means to an end or a giant loophole in the effort to curb pollution worldwide. The student blog reporting from Bali captures these angles, and more.

According to the story, some 20 students from Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies are in attendance, as well as a contingent from SustainUS, a student network that promotes sustainable development. You can meet the SustainUS delegation here or follow their progress on the student-run environmental blog "It's Getting Hot In Here". Yale's green blog, which regularly chronicles environmental research at the university, is also writing heavily from Bali.

Ohio University Greens Its Courses

When is environmental science not enough? When it is limited to just the ES department.

Ohio University's student newspaper says professors there recently held a workshop on integrating environmentalism into more OU classes. The workshop's organizers seem to have hit a nerve: The newspaper says that 50 faculty members applied for the 20 spots in the workshop. Those who got in heard lectures about different aspects of sustainability and how to incorporate them into their classes. The professors behind the project said they believed that 20 undergraduate courses could eventually be revised to add more green content.

OU, which is located in Athens, Ohio, currently has four undergraduate green majors in its Department of Environmental and Plant Biology, as well as a bachelors in environmental health science. It also offers an interdisciplinary certificate program in environmental studies through its College of Arts and Sciences. At the graduate school level, it offers an interdisciplinary master of science in environmental studies.

Major Buzz About Environmental Science

It's time to declare a major on many college campuses and at the University of Arizona, many students are opting for environmental science.

According to a post on the university newspaper's Web site, one or two students have been coming into the major during the fall semester. Of particular interest: a new concentration in environmental education. UA believes there is a ready market for people who can explain what is going on in environmental science to a broader public.

At, UA, environmental science belongs to its College of Agriculture and Life Sciences' Department of Soil, Water and Environmental Science, which offers bachelors, masters and doctoral degrees. It is conducting interesting research into the impact of chemical contaminants on soil and water supplies, water and waste management and soil and groundwater remediation.

Divorce Is Bad For The Environment

Nothing is safe from the gaze of environmental researchers at America's college's and universities. Nothing, not consumer behavior and now, not even love and marriage.

Jianguo Liu, a professor at Michigan State University, contends in a new study that divorce has a negative impact on the environment. Divorced people, it seems, use more electricity and water than married households: 42% to 61% more resources per person than when they were married.

For more than 20 years, Liu has focused his research on how ecology interacts with socioeconomics, looking at the relationship between nature and humans and how their interactions affect the environment. Michigan State, which is based in East Lansing, Mich., offers 17 majors in aspects of evironmental studies and environmental science. Some of the more unusual ones includes environmental and resource economics, environmental geosciences and environmental toxicology.