Last week the U.N. Environment Program announced that the number of oxygen-deprived "dead zones" in the world’s oceans has been increasing since the 1970s and has nearly reached 150, threatening fisheries as well as humans who depend on fish.
I’ve been hearing that wind power is going to play a significant role in our energy future. What’s the story?
The problem with trying to keep up with President Bush is that it’s a war with many fronts: Beat him down over, say, wetlands protection, and he pops up with a new plan to ease restrictions on cutting down old-growth forests. Block his insane fixation with drilling for oil in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and he tries to kill legislation aimed at getting toxic mercury out of the environment.
Government scientists monitoring the health of the skies from atop Mauna Loa Observatory on Hawaii’s Big Island are reporting that carbon dioxide (CO2) levels have reached record-high levels in the global atmosphere after growing at an accelerated pace over the past year.
According to recently released figures from the U.S. Census Bureau, the growth rate of the world population has slowed down considerably over the last decade. In 2002, humanity added 74 million people to its global population, down from 87 million added per year a decade ago.
The Environmental Protection Agency reported last week that it has taken Love Canal off its Superfund list, declaring clean-up work in the area complete. The contamination of soil and groundwater in the Niagara Falls, New York neighborhood spurred Congress in 1980 to pass its landmark Superfund legislation mandating clean-up of industrial pollution sites across the U.S.
A steep decline in birds, butterflies and native plants in Britain supports the theory that humans are pushing the natural world into the Earth’s sixth bigextinction event and the future may see more and more animal species disappearing.
Sea turtles have long endured the pressures of hunting, intensive fishing practices and habitat degradation, including loss of nesting beaches due to human encroachment. In the last 20 years, marine turtles have also been the victims of a deadly tumor called Fibropapilloma
The politics of paper are not as simple as they seem. E’s forthcoming May/June cover story is all about paper: how it’s produced, how it gets recycled and non-wood alternatives. But the more I looked into the paper issue, the more complicated it became.
According to the San Francisco, California-based Bluewater Network, which wants to ban snowmobile use in national parks, 250,000 snowmobiles are operated in America’s park system each year, with some 60,000 snowmobiles zooming through Yellowstone National Park
