Just 700 miles to the Southeast of the sybarites enjoying the Sun on Hawaii’s Waikki Beach, the Army maintains a $240 million island facility with a grim purpose. The Johnston Atoll Chemical Agent Disposal System (JACADS) exists solely for the purpose of destroying obsoete – and frightening – chemical weapons.
The western environmental team boarded the Russian bus from the Hanoi airport, after cutting through rice paddies of every imaginable hue of green, tended by women in conical hats and watched over by teary-eyed water buffaloes. It was the Vietnam of every news report, every post-war film.
Seven years after it was brokered by the United Nations, the Kyoto Protocol went into effect last week, despite lack of involvement by the world’s biggest polluter, the United States.
A recent survey by two environmental groups concludes that on at least 200 occasions, staff scientists at the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS) have been compelled to alter findings in order to weaken protection for endangered and threatened species.
The environmental movement is facing some pretty tough challenges. Not only has the shamelessly retrograde George W. Bush been re-elected to the Presidency of the United States, but Republicans, whose overall voting record is significantly less environment-friendly than that of the Democrats, have had their majorities increased in both the Senate and the House of Representatives.
The numbers say it all. Each year an average of 25 people across the world die as a result of a shark attack. You have one in 300 million chance of meeting your maker in the mouth of a shark. The sharks, on the other hand, wish they had our odds. While U.S. Department of Health mortality statistics show that Americans are more likely to be killed by lightning than by a shark, the Department of Commerce estimates that people kill 100 million sharks a year. In order to keep up with us, sharks would have to eat the entire combined population of Mexico and Texas every year.
The White House budget proposal for 2006 is counting on income from opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to oil drilling, much to the dismay of many environmentalists. The White House is projecting that the federal government will take in up to $1.2 billion over the next two years from oil companies paying for the right to lease oil drilling permits within ANWR.
Much to the chagrin of conservationists hoping that the Bush administration would start considering its environmental legacy during its second term, the White House budget proposal for 2006 calls for a six percent cut in funding for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
When I met Sister Dorothy Stang, I knew I was encountering someone remarkable. I met her in Belém, the capital of Pará state in northern Brazil. Belém has more than a million people, and it was not the natural habitat for Dayton, Ohio native Dorothy Stang. She lived far from the city in a remote Amazonian jungle settlement populated by the landless peasants whose interests she tirelessly protected, along with the rainforest itself.
Alligators with undersized testicles may seem like a problem only for other alligators, but scientists at the University of Florida (UF) argue that what happens to gators today may well happen to humans tomorrow.In Fact, the alarming reproductive problems of Florida’s alligators may be surfacing in largemouth bass, a sign of widespread lake pollution
