Top 5 Stories We Read This Week: Hacking the Cloud, FSC+, and More

A beautiful map of amazing places, why FSC is still best wood certification, and the scary story of why you should still make your own file backups.

My kids scrambled up the granite hill known as the South Bubble for the fourth or fifth time last week in Acadia National Park. Acadia is the only National Park we've been to, but after seeing the Sierra Club's "subway" map, we intend to change that ASAP.Photo Credit: Paula Melton

Next stop, Yosemite

The Sierra Club has released an elegantly simple “subway map” of U.S. National Parks. How many stops have you made? See the map over at Treehugger and start your checklist.

FSC: Still the best

A great read on why FSC is still the best rating system for forestry products, although the others have improved. Perkins+Will recently reviewed its “FSC + Better” policy and decided to stick with it because “as a rule, FSC emphasizes real performance in the forest, whereas the other systems are more focused on intended outcomes,” writes P+W’s Doug Pierce. (For more context, see our series examining the “wood wars” in terms of economics, LEED credits, and global warming.)

Back up! And get your head out of the clouds!

Environmentalists have rushed to embrace cloud-based storage and computing practices, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves; aside from the serious energy issues to think through, we also need to back up our data in multiple places and think more carefully about security. This piece by Mat Honan at Wired reads like a thriller about the dangers of a purely digital life—but it’s frighteningly real. If you’re living in the cloud, be careful up there.

When carbon credits go terribly wrong

The New York Times reported on a carbon credit program that has led to feverish production of super-high-GWP refrigerants—specifically so the companies producing them can be paid to destroy them.

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The companies are threatening to release the refrigerants into the atmosphere if the UN tries to change the program.

Learn how to design zero-energy homes

This self-paced online course offered through the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association covers everything from solar orientation and energy modeling to meticulous design details for controlling vapor, air, and heat flow in a zero-energy house. Taught by Marc Rosenbaum, designer of these eight super-homes on Martha’s Vineyard.