The ocean is an important factor in absorbing and mitigating Earth’s carbon emissions, but it is becoming overloaded with carbon. Between 2000 and 2001, its absorbtion rate decreased by 10 percent.

The University of California is an awesome institution. Its ten campuses give 150,000 college students a high-quality public education every year and UC Berkeley, UCSF, and Boalt Hall can compete with any super-expensive private school on quality and reputation. UC Davis is largely responsible for California’s fantastic wine, and for some reason UCLA is crazy famous in Asia. It’s a model for public higher education.

But the University of California has been getting less awesome because it’s been getting less affordable. The state has been giving the University of California less money, and the UC system is passing the favor along by hiking up rates for students. This year, the UC’s Board of Regents is raising college tuition another 32 percent. A year at UCLA will now cost $10,300, three times the price in 1999. Students are rightfully outraged.

But you know what California has managed to find the money for? Warehousing people in prison. This chart from Kevin Drum shows the parallel between tuition hikes at the UC schools and money spent on “corrections” in the state.

Do you think making the UC schools less affordable will create more or fewer future criminals? That’s a rhetorical question. The budget issues are complex, but it’s ridiculous to be spending this kind of public money on prison and denying it for education.

Photo from Flickr user Epioles (cc).

Serenity now!

Luckily for me and all travelers, the TSA knows how complicated deciding what fits into the ever-nebulous “gel, aerosol, and liquid” category, especially with holiday specific items, so they’ve published this helpful list of holiday foodstuffs not to bring on the plane:

• Cranberry sauce
• Creamy dips and spreads
  (cheeses, peanut butter, etc.)
• Gift baskets with food items
  (salsa, jams and salad dressings)
• Gravy
• Jams
• Jellies

• Maple syrup
• Oils and vinegars
• Salad dressing
• Salsa
• Sauces
• Soups
• Wine, liquor, and beer

Also, no snow globes. Remember, knowing is half the battle.

Via TPM.

The test drive found some kinks still to work out (sometimes the generator becomes not silent, but very, very loud), but this is a pretty exceptionally good review of what could be the car that changes a lot of things—both for the environment and the American automotive industry—when it’s released in nine months.

And here is an accompanying slideshow of Volt porn.

Today on Twitter we asked our followers when they last went to see a doctor or dentist and whether the visit was covered by health insurance. We collected some of our favorite responses below. We ask a question to our Twitter faithful once a day, so if you’re not yet following @GOOD, make sure to sign up and participate in the conversation.

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We aren’t sure if this is in the wild, or someone’s pet crab to whom the owner gave an offering of a broken bottle as shelter. Either way, it’s kinda cute and kinda frightening. It doesn’t take much of a leap of though to figure this might be increasingly what our ocean critters look like—from crabs using broken bottles to octopi and eels using various discarded baskets and jugs for homes.

Read more about the health of our oceans in the full post.

The Fall is a photographic survey of our historic unconscious. Mosse traveled to intensely remote locations, from the Patagonian Andes to the Yukon Territories, and worked as an embed with the US military to produce work for this exhibition. The Fall is a rescue mission to try to locate our blasted sense of landscape and archeology, and reclaim the primeval waste for our imagination. Produced to an epic scale, each of the photographs in The Fall is a history painting for our times.

727, Santo Domingo, January, 2009.

C-47, Alberta, June, 2009.

Entropy has always been a painfully difficult concept for me to accept, yet it’s undeniable and unavoidable. There’s a grand sadness to the inevitability of material decay and transformation, which is masterfully captured in this series—just as it was in “Breach.” But that sadness doesn’t detract from the beauty of these photos. If anything, it adds to it.

Curtis Commando, Patagonia, November, 2008.

The Jack Shainman Gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. “The Fall” will show from November 19 through December 23. You can see all the images on Mosse’s website.

There’s a Jack Johnson song called “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle,” and we all know these three R’s are a good place to start when it comes to living a more sustainable life. While recycling tends to get the most attention, reducing and reusing can be equally effective tools in the battle to get by without creating a mountain of waste in the meantime.

Take, for example, eating. We all eat. We eat on the go, at home, at restaurants, in the car, at the office, at school, alone, socially—meals are an integral part our lives. Meals are also an easy place to make a difference environmentally: nearly one third of the waste produced in the United States is from packaging, and food packaging accounts for much of that.

Start by paying attention to your grocery shopping. Look at the way things are packaged, and opt for items with as little packaging as possible. Choose glass or paper packaging over plastic and Styrofoam. Go to the deli section for meats and cheeses. Prepackaged meats and cheeses often come on Styrofoam and wrapped in plastic. The butcher or deli at your grocery store will usually wrap your purchase in a bit of waxed paper.

Purchase fruits and vegetables from local farmer’s markets or produce stands. If that’s not an option, avoid produce in plastic containers and skip the baggie—your selections can be weighed just the same at the register. If possible, avoid individually wrapped items altogether by buying in bulk. Bringing your own bags with you whenever possible helps a great deal. Leave a few in your car and by the front door so you can grab them before you go.

When packing meals or snacks, chose reusable options for packaging. Love My Planet Lunches is a great company that makes washable, reusable bags you can take on the go. Keep a coffee mug and water bottle in the car, at the office, or by the front door. When you get a drink, you can opt for your reusable bottles and avoid adding to the 2.5 million plastic bottles thrown away each hour. Some stores offer a discount for those who bring their own cups.

When getting a snack, take it without a bag or box. If you order a bagel, ask that they put the cream cheese on it for you. This eliminates the plastic knife and container for the spread. If you are ordering takeout or bringing home leftovers, ask that they not include napkins, utensils, coupons, or condiments. If your office orders in, keep silverware and cloth napkins in your desk. In general, use storage containers instead of plastic bags, foil, and plastic wrap. Bringing awareness to your daily life is the biggest step.

It’s inevitable that we will purchase packaged items and that will create some waste. But, we can do our part to change the amount of packaging and waste we put out. Quite often, making these changes will benefit your wallet as well. Price tags are affected by packaging. When you buy local or in bulk, you remove the added cost of packaging. Not only does the earth win, your wallet wins too. A lovely shade of green for everyone.

Guest blogger Milissa Skoro is an actress and works on the Leadership Council for NRDC. Photo (cc) by Flickr user oceandesetoiles.

A look at what the internet is doing for learning, curiosity, and creativity outside the traditional classroom.

The average cost of a Bachelor’s degree at a public, four-year liberal arts university is $26,340. At a private one, it’s $100,520, and the Ivy League commands more than $160,000. And while the value of education is universally indisputable, the emergence of new online tools and platforms has challenged its price tag, empowering us to take charge of our own intellectual development.

In recent years, we’ve seen initiatives like AcademicEarth, MIT’s OpenCourseWare, the U.K.’s Open University and iTunesU open up the virtual gates of the world’s top universities to the intellectually curious, regardless of their location or financial situation. Today, you can click your way to lectures about Roman architecture from Yale, entrepreneurship from the University of Cambridge, the history of jazz from Arizona State University, microbiology from Berkley, and the morality of murder from Harvard.

But besides the opening up of access to education, we’ve also seen an opening up of its definition—no longer confined to the traditional world of academia, “education” now spans a much broader spectrum of learning, inspiration and curiosity. Smart blogs, online magazines, and publishers like TED and Pop!Tech have made enormous strides toward this evolution by offering content that is both intellectually and emotionally engaging, bringing an element of production value to the traditional lecture format. And, not coincidentally, they’ve reached a massive audience of self-learning enthusiasts—since TED Talks first became available in 2006, more than 180 million have been watched worldwide.

Of course, most would agree the true “value” of higher education isn’t merely in the lectures but also in the sociocultural experience of being among open-minded others who have come together to learn, socialize and, let’s face it, party. But putting a price tag on such an environment assumes it can only be handed to us rather than self-acquired, and in the era of citizen empowerment, this is a dated and somewhat docile surrender to learned—and learning—helplessness.

As web communities continue to garner critical mass, these learning environments are bound not by the brick walls of a college campus but by the broadband cables that wrap the globe. Even in our analog social circles, why not conceive of self-initiated neo-education events and environments for young adults, an intersection of dinner parties and college classes where we watch a Stanford lecture about Darwin’s legacy, then discuss it over a glass of wine?

TED has had phenomenal success with TEDx—a program of self-organized TED-like events, designed to bring local “ideas worth spreading” to light and spark public debate within the community. While this isn’t traditional education, TED has long been a beacon of intellectual empowerment and the TEDx program offers hope for a viable, powerful model for such self-initiated neo-education bolstered by a community of like-minded knowledge- and idea-hungry peers.

In my own experience, I can frankly admit that the first month of watching TED gave me more knowledge,  insight, and inspiration than all four years of the glorified status symbol that is Ivy League education. Which says something about traditional academia’s continued failure to compel, but mostly about the power of neo-education to do so. This paradigm shift is redefining both our relationship with education and our conception of “free”—tuition-free freedom of access and choice, an empowered self-guided tour of knowledge, validated not by a framed diploma but by something far more meaningful: The gratification of having pursued and explored our deepest intellectual curiosity.

This is not to say it’s an either-or situation—but the complementary role of personal initiative in the pursuit of insight is increasingly important. When the liberal arts model was first conceived in 5th century A.D., at its heart was an effort to fulfill students’ broadest intellectual potential by exposing them to a wide and eclectic array of general knowledge, as opposed to narrow specialization. But over the course of the past century, the liberal arts curriculum has mutated—students are selecting specialties like Premed and Marketing as early as their freshman year, zooming in on a narrowly defined path towards med school or an MBA.

Academia seems to have lost its capacity for inspiring the kind of indiscriminate curiosity so fundamental to developing a well-rounded intellectual and creative awareness about the world.

“Liberal arts education no longer exists in this country. We have professionalized liberal arts to the point where they no longer provide the breadth of education and enhanced capacity for civic engagement that is their signature,” says Bennington college president Liz Coleman—ironically, at TED. “The progression of today’s college student is to jettison every interest but one, and within that one, to continually narrow the focus, learning more and more about less and less—this, despite all the evidence around us of the interconnectedness of things.”

This is where neo-education steps in—not necessarily as a substitute for a university degree, at least not at this point, but as a necessary filler for the many gaps in today’s higher education, an essential exercise in flexing our inherent human curiosity about the world before it atrophies into the narrow scope of skill and vision that the original liberal arts model aimed to eradicate in the first place. In an age driven by the cross-pollination of ideas, viewpoints, and disciplines, it is only through such indiscriminate curiosity and exploration that we can truly liberalize our collective future.

Guest blogger Maria Popova is the editor of Brain Pickings, a curated inventory of miscellaneous interestingness. She writes for Wired U.K. and spends a shameful amount of time on Twitter.

Illustration by Will Etling.