Light electric vehicles can save energy, cut congestion and spare the air, and have gained attention in the last decade for their positive environmental potential. But in practice, they haven’t quite caught on.

Seahorses may have the best love lives of any fish in the ocean. These delicate, swirled-tail members of the <I>syngnathid</I> family (pipefish, sea dragons) are frequently depicted in mythology, rapturously entwined. But this millennia-old dance may soon be over, as seahorses are increasingly endangered.

It has never been easier to fly. Internet-based services and third-party affiliates like Travelocity.com and CheapTickets.com now offer plane tickets at all-time lows, conveniently purchased with a simple click of the mouse. While these fares may seem like a dream come true for low-budget travelers, the resulting surge in air traffic carries with it major environmental costs.

The rock piles outside the Western Mineral Products plant were too good to pass up. "We all played over there," recalls Kevin Reich, who moved to the neighborhood as a sixth-grader in 1979. But the rock piles were the by-product of processing vermiculite ore mined by W.R. Grace & Company in Libby, Montana, and they’re now known to contain asbestos.

It seems patently unfair that Europeans are probably doing more than any people on Earth to reduce global warming emissions, and yet Europe is in the vanguard of feeling the heat. A report released by the European Environment Agency (EEA) August 18 said that the continent is warming more rapidly than the rest of the world, with the likely results heat waves (like the scorcher in France that killed 15,000 people last summer), floods and the loss of three quarters of the Swiss Alps’ glaciers by 2050.

In anticipation of a call from the Bush administration to take the grizzly bear off the threatened species list, the U.S. Forest Service has released a grizzly habitat management plan for the six national forests it operates surrounding Yellowstone National Park. Environmentalists say the plan does not protect enough habitat to ensure that the bear’s recovery takes hold.

Researchers from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado released findings last week predicting that cities in the U.S. and Europe would likely suffer from more frequent and intense heat waves in years to come as a result of global warming.