Currents

I wanted to know more about the Gulf Stream, and so went to Answers.com, which informed me that this warm, slow-moving current was first described by Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon in 1513. "The Gulf Stream originates in the Gulf of Mexico and, as the Florida Current, passes through the Straits of Florida and along the coast of the southeastern United States with a breadth of 50 miles.

Scientists from Stanford University and the Monterey Bay Aquarium are calling on fisheries managers to place tighter restrictions on harvests of bluefin tuna from the western Atlantic Ocean, where they say populations have dwindled as much as 80 percent since the 1970s.

After a month and a half of debate, the Senate has finally confirmed Stephen Johnson to head up the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Johnson, an EPA lifer and the first scientist to be tapped to lead the agency in its three-decade history, must have breathed a sigh of relief after enduring criticism of agency policies from several Democratic Senators.

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.

A popular fiction in South Dakota and elsewhere is that one nibble, one burrow, one high-pitched chirp at a time, the black-tailed prairie dog is invading and destroying grasslands for livestock. As Blaine Harden recently reported in <I>The Washington Post</I>, third-generation rancher Charles Kruze even compared South Dakota’s rodential downpour to a "prairie fire."

Echoing public sentiment, President Bush has been talking a lot about energy in his latest round of speeches. In order to deflect criticism over steadily rising fuel prices, Bush wants to build new oil refineries on decommissioned military bases, expand eligibility for a proposed tax credit on fuel-cell and hybrid vehicles to cars and trucks that burn "clean diesel" fuel, increase federal authority over the siting of onshore liquefied natural gas terminals, and renew a push to expand nuclear power capabilities.

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.

The San Francisco-based Goldman Environmental Foundation recently announced the six 2005 winners of its prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize.

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.