In this era of climate change, lightning-fast global travel and ecotourism we are also seeing the rise of new diseases that spread with frightening virulence and speed. Environmental fluctuations enable diseases to evolve quickly and spread from species to species, while human beings transport them rapidly around the world.
After every meal she and her family eat at home, Philadelphian Happy Fernandez dumps food scraps into a big plastic bag she keeps in her refridgerator. Then on Sunday and Wednesday nights, she puts the accumulated waste into a bucket and sets it out curbside. By morning, the bucket is empty and a contented group of New Jersey pigs is burping in satisfaction over a gourmet breakfast.
What happens to empty plastic soda bottles left out on the curb for recycling? Would you believe they’re made into luggage racks and door padding for cars?
Snow leopard pelts command high prizes in the black market fur trade, while bones from these wild cats are in demand as remedies prescribed by traditional Asian medicine. However, half a world away, the snow leopard is being marketed in an entirely different way—one that may help ensure its survival.
Scientists are applying ecological lessons learned in the aftermath of the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption to restore sites that were logged or mined.
The Yerington Anaconda Mine in northern Nevada was one of the world’s largest producers of copper from 1953 to 2000. Today, nearby residents complain the defunct site is a major polluter. The Yerington Paiute Tribe’s (YPT) Campbell Ranch Reservation is barely three miles north, downwind from the 3,500-acre mining property and squarely in the path of any contaminants that might leave the mine.
Threatened by erosion, desertification, overgrazing and global warming, cedar forests in the Moroccan Middle Atlas Mountains are going through a hard time. But what if Barbary macaques, which have inhabited the area for centuries and feed on the top of cedar trees, were also a threat?
Volunteers in the Louisiana Bucket Brigade monitor air pollution in the neighborhoods adjoining ExxonMobil’s Chalmette Oil Refinery.
Sometimes medicine isn’t as glamorous as it sounds. Take Premarin, the leading estrogen replacement drug prescribed to about eight million women to prevent the "hot flashes" of menopause or the "dowager’s hump" of osteoporosis in old age. Wyeth-Averst Laboratories has made the drug for 50 years, but the basic ingredient remains a natural estrogen collected from the urine of pregnant mares.
Yolanda Rivera parks her rusty two-toned Cadillac Seville on the cracked concrete driveway at the site of her future factory in New York City’s South Bronx. She may not be your typical capitalist entrepreneur, but then the Bronx is not your typical park. Manufacturers have been abandoning the brick factories for decades, leaving only the giant Hunts Point wholesale food market, and Rivera now stands in the 90-acre Harlem rail yards which have done little but grow weeds since the early 70s.
