In recent years, high commodities prices, lax national laws and corrupt governments have intensified interest in mining Latin America’s vast ore lodes. But miners are increasingly pitted against indigenous movements demanding, sometimes violently, social investments and environmental protections.
When John von Gonten came down with sinus & respiratory problems & severe headaches, he suspected Alcoa, located eight miles from his property.
Peter Cordani’s plan is to fly planes into the eye of a hurricane, cutting a triangular swath to the center while dumping his absorbent “hurricane powder.” As the polymer powder absorbs the hurricane’s moisture, in theory it would slow down the rotation and cool the storm, thus taking much of the force out of it.
Wild jaguars in the U.S.? What sounds implausible was proven true in 1996 when two male jaguars were photographed, first in southern New Mexico and then in Arizona. Until that time, experts had concluded that our hemisphere’s biggest cat had disappeared forever from America.
More than 100,000 seabirds of various species washed up on Pacific beaches from central California to British Columbia this past summer—at a time when they should have been in peak condition. Was climate change a factor?
Activists at Coal River Mountain Watch and other organizations connect a record of environmental disasters with the issue of mountaintop removal mining, a practice routinely used by Big Coal in Appalachia.
Decades of oppressive, one-party rule and economic embargoes have left Armenia overwhelmingly poor and desperate, and poverty has led to destruction of the very natural resources that are the country’s most precious heritage.
At Jeanne Braha Troy’s climate-neutral wedding last summer, guests left without any lace-bedecked pictures of the bride and groom. They didn’t leave empty-handed, though: Guests received a more stable climate and cleaner air. Many other people are jumping into the fray, planning climate-neutral conferences, graduations, parties and sporting events.
The Kenai Peninsula is often named as one of the most diverse and beautiful regions of Alaska. The vast majority of the peninsula lies within public lands, including national and state parks, a wildlife refuge and a national forest (see Going Green, “Alaska in Miniature,” July/August 1998). Today, there’s a major threat to its wetlands. An invasive plant called purple loosestrife (native to Europe) has been found growing wild in nearby Anchorage for the first time.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), influenza has been a common communicable disease in birds for centuries (see "Connecting the Dots," cover story, November/December 2004). Most strains are confined only to birds and are generally non-lethal, much like human influenza viruses. Recently though, there have been questions raised over the H5N1 strain of avian influenza that has been crossing over into human beings in Southeast Asia.
