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.
The California Rice Commission voted six to five last week to approve the nation’s first commercial-scale planting of a crop genetically engineered to produce drug compounds.
Last week the Bush Administration took the controversial survey-and-manage provision–which required the review of potential timber sales for the presence of endangered species–out of the Northwest Forest Plan.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For the last two weeks I’ve been touring the Pacific Northwest and northern California in support of E’s new book: Feeling the Heat: Dispatches From the Frontlines of Climate Change (Routledge). It’s safe to say that audiences here (ranging from 12 people to more than 100) are receptive to our message that global warming is no longer a matter for scientific debate, but an observable fact.
