Sixty years after its last confirmed U.S. sighting, the ivory-billed woodpecker has shown up in an Arkansas swamp, much to the delight of birders and conservationists alike. Hot Springs, Arkansas resident Gene Sparling reported the first recent sighting of the bird in February 2004 after canoeing through a bald cypress swamp in the Big Woods Preserve, which is already owned and protected by the Nature Conservancy.
cut flowers are one of the world’s most pesticide-intensive crops. Flower workers, of which there are roughly 200,000 worldwide, pay the heaviest price.
Why are so many environmentalists against nuclear power when it’s a reliable way to get emissions–free power 24×7 (unlike solar and wind)?
We Americans spend 90 percent of our life indoors. More than half of that time is spent in office buildings, where we toil in workspaces filled with stale, recycled air, and labor under the glare of fluorescent lights, without sunlight or views of the outdoors.
Earth First has been declared dead many times. In 1987, it was founder Dave Foreman, whose years of grumbling became enshrined in movement music as "The Twelve Resignations," sung to the tune of "The Twelve Days of Christmas." More recently, the somewhat amorphous movement—which doesn’t agree on much, but achieves consensus on not harming people in its work—was hit with the incendiary "ecoterrorism" tag.
You’d need environmental blinders to believe the horsefeathers retailed in the "Index of Leading Environmental Indicators." Each year, the Pacific Research Institute (PRI) and author Steven F. Hayward present these pseudo-scientific "indicators" that claim all is well with the earth. People swallow this hokum because they are, in fact, starved for good green information, and the environmental illiteracy rate in the U.S. is very high.
The San Francisco-based Goldman Environmental Foundation recently announced the six 2005 winners of its prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize.
When Roman Catholic cardinals chose Germany’s Joseph Ratzinger to succeed Pope John Paul II last week, they probably gave little thought to the implications for the environment. That said, though, the Pope, given his influence over the world’s billion Catholics, can play a significant role in environmental issues simply by interpreting Bible passages in one way or another.
When forest fires occur, they can release significant amounts of gases and soot particles (known as “particulate matter”) into the atmosphere, where wind currents can then carry them great distances across major water bodies and national boundaries.
Researchers are uncovering a definite link between environmental pollutants and a growing number of autoimmune diseases. Disorders like lupus, multiple sclerosis (MS) and Type I diabetes are on the rise, says Glinda Cooper, an epidemiologist with the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). "It’s very likely that environmental factors play a role in the development of these diseases," Cooper says.
