EarthTalk Q&A Archive: Your Environmental Questions Answered

Indeed, the first few years of the 21st century have played host to wildfires of unprecedented proportions throughout the American West, killing hundreds of people and displacing thousands more, while causing billions of dollars in property damage.

When the international environmental advocacy group Greenpeace made a decision in 2001 to invest in Shell Oil, it caused gasps in the environmental community, which wondered why the group, known for its daring tactics against polluters

First developed as a power source for NASA’s Apollo missions, fuel cells convert hydrogen and oxygen into usable electricity, with heat and water as byproducts.

Organophosphate pesticides (OPs), which include the widely used insecticide malathion, are chemically related to nerve gases developed during World War II. For decades, scientists have been debating whether such pesticides cause birth defects

Biologists estimate that, since the beginning of large-scale commercial fishing in the late 1950s, more than 10 million dolphins have been drowned when inadvertently snared in the huge underwater driftnets meant to catch tuna and other fish. Driftnets, which can extend 50 miles as they are left to drag overnight, are indiscriminate killing tools often referred to as “walls of death.”

While information about pollutants has been publicly available in the U.S. since passage of the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act of 1986, the public was not able to access it easily until the advent of the Internet, which now makes the research quite easy.