Saving Sharks in Baja California?

In El Portugues, a small fishing camp in Mexico’s Baja California Sur, moustachioed fishermen with tobacco-colored skin glide to shore in 21-foot panga boats and unload their modest catch of small sharks and devil rays. It seems innocuous enough, given that most of the sharks, skates and rays (a class known as elasmobranches) are being harvested via small-scale, non-industrialized methods. But according to a two-year survey led by Robert Hueter, director of the Center for Shark Research in Sarasota, Florida, there are 147 fishing camps along the Gulf of California supporting 4,000 to 5,500 active pangas targeting elasmobranches.

Saving the Sound

Long Island Sound is a celebrated estuary stretching from New London, Connecticut and Long Island to New York City. Its shores are home to nine million people and its watershed stretches 17,000 square miles.

High-Volume Organic

With 3,700 stores in all 50 states, Wal-Mart is well known as the country’s top seller of diapers, toothpaste, DVDs, breakfast cereal and organic lettuce? It may not hold that honor yet, but it’s well on its way.

Across the Great Divide

Relations between Israel and Jordan are strained, largely due to the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In the Arab world in general, study in Israel is verboten. But Jordanian students opt for environmental studies at the Albert Katz Institute in Israel because the school’s team of professors and researchers is renowned globally for its breakthrough environmental research, including drip irrigation, solar energy harnessing, algae cultivation and brackish water salmon farming. The Jordanians also come to experience a different culture and "see these people we’ve fought with and heard about all our lives with our own eyes," one student confides.

The New Accounting

Although looking at natural resources in terms of dollars and cents may call to mind greed-mongering capitalists lighting cigars with hundred-dollar bills, in reality a failure to account for the financial value of a nation’s natural resources and environmental services unwittingly promotes taking the environment for granted and retards the development of poor nations.

Hummers on the Homefront

In the past few decades, houses have gotten greener, but they’ve gotten bigger too, leaving lingering questions: Is super-sized housing defeating conservation efforts? Can McMansions truly be green?

Reef Madness

This May marked the first time any species of Caribbean coral was designated as threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act (see "Clouds Over the Coral," Features, March/April 1999). The two species added, staghorn (Acropora cervicornis) and elkhorn (Acropora palmata), have both suffered a 97 percent decline since the late 1970s due to a combination of disease and human disturbance. By far the greatest culprit, however, is coral bleaching caused by rising ocean temperatures.

Heavy Metal Songbirds

As if songbirds didn’t have enough to contend with! Not only is their Latin American winter habitat threatened as forest canopy coffee growing gives way to full-sun plantations (see "Grounds for Change," cover story, November/ December 2005), but a recent survey of the birds in New York State finds they’re also dealing with high body levels of mercury.

Admitting Oil Addiction

President Bush famously admitted in his State of the Union address last January that “America is addicted to oil.” E took a look at our addiction in The Outlook on Oil (cover story, January/February 2006). Now the International Energy Outlook (IEO) reports that the U.S. actually decreased its oil consumption in 2005.

Rafting the Kennebec: White Water and Adventure Tourism

The water in Maine’s Kennebec River looks a bit like root beer. That was just one of many thoughts that flashed through my head as I hurled through the turbulence known as "Big Momma" on a bright yellow raft supplied by adventure outfitters Northern Outdoors.

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