Imagine a South Pacific paradise, steeped in the 18th century history of Captain James Cook and William Bligh of Mutiny on the Bounty fame. You can almost smell fragrant frangipani blossoms, taste sweet papayas and feel cool breezes. Now add to that vision: blue starfish, a sparrow-size-bird threatened by extinction and a tree-climbing senior citizen.
Twenty years ago, much of the public land around the San Pedro River in southeastern Arizona resembled the barren and desolate landscape found in a Sub-Saharan desert. For years, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management had granted grazing permits to ranchers for thousands of acres of fragile land along the San Pedro.
In yet another case of habitat destruction endangering an already protected wildlife species, Australia’s koala bears are facing extinction unless concerned citizens and government officials can stem the tide of urbanization sweeping across the country’s eastern seaboard.
This past week the Green Party selected California lawyer David Cobb as its nominee for the upcoming Presidential election, snubbing 2000 party nominee Ralph Nader, who is again running for the White House. While Nader, who many Democrats considered a spoiler in 2000 for taking crucial votes away from Al Gore, would provide greater name recognition for the Greens, Cobb received a majority of the half-million-member party’s delegates.
Forty-eight American Nobel Science Prize winners have endorsed John Kerry’s bid for the White House, citing their hope that the Democratic challenger can help the U.S. regain its focus on scientific research and technological development.
On a beach in North Carolina, my cousin Andy pointed up to the night sky and said, "Look, there’s the Big Dipper!" My two girls, ages seven and 10, followed his hand and, after some squinting and trying really hard, were able to see that those dim beacons formed a pattern, one they’d seen in pictures.
Last week, frozen genetic tissue samples from an Arabian oryx, a spotted sea horse and a British field cricket were among the first specimens to be included in a unique project aimed at storing and preserving genetic material from 10,000 or so endangered species from around the globe.
Indeed, the first few years of the 21st century have played host to wildfires of unprecedented proportions throughout the American West, killing hundreds of people and displacing thousands more, while causing billions of dollars in property damage.
When the international environmental advocacy group Greenpeace made a decision in 2001 to invest in Shell Oil, it caused gasps in the environmental community, which wondered why the group, known for its daring tactics against polluters
It’s been a difficult year for opponents of whaling. In August, Iceland announced it would resume whale hunting after a 14-year hiatus. Norway—the only nation in the world that has a commercial whale hunt—killed 647 minkes, the largest catch since it resumed whaling a decade ago. Meanwhile Japan, which kills nearly 700 minkes for "scientific" […]
