Browsed by
Category: Environment

Research on honeybees hit by Trump budget cuts

Research on honeybees hit by Trump budget cuts

Comments 0 Comment

CNN reports: The US Department of Agriculture has suspended data collection for its annual Honey Bee Colonies report, citing cost cuts — a move that robs researchers and the honeybee industry of a critical tool for understanding honeybee population declines, and comes as the USDA is curtailing other research programs. It’s also another step toward undoing President Barack Obama’s government-wide focus on protecting pollinators, including bees and butterflies, whose populations have plummeted in recent years. [Continue reading…] WJLA reports: Last…

Read More Read More

Ecologists are racing to restore the world’s tropical rainforests

Ecologists are racing to restore the world’s tropical rainforests

Comments 0 Comment

Forest restoration is underway in Biliran, Leyte, Philippines led by the local community with support from international researchers and government agencies. Robin Chazdon, CC BY-ND By Robin Chazdon, University of Connecticut The green belt of tropical rainforests that covers equatorial regions of the Americas, Africa, Indonesia and Southeast Asia is turning brown. Since 1990, Indonesia has lost 50% of its original forest, the Amazon 30% and Central Africa 14%. Fires, logging, hunting, road building and fragmentation have heavily damaged more…

Read More Read More

Tree planting ‘has mind-blowing potential’ to tackle climate crisis

Tree planting ‘has mind-blowing potential’ to tackle climate crisis

Comments 0 Comment

The Guardian reports: Planting billions of trees across the world is by far the biggest and cheapest way to tackle the climate crisis, according to scientists, who have made the first calculation of how many more trees could be planted without encroaching on crop land or urban areas. As trees grow, they absorb and store the carbon dioxide emissions that are driving global heating. New research estimates that a worldwide planting programme could remove two-thirds of all the emissions that…

Read More Read More

Orangutans: Palm oil industry still threatens the lives and habitat of ‘people of the forest’

Orangutans: Palm oil industry still threatens the lives and habitat of ‘people of the forest’

Comments 0 Comment

The New York Times reports: The men came at Hope and her baby with spears and guns. But she would not leave. There was no place for her to go. When the air-gun pellets pierced Hope’s eyes, blinding her, she felt her way up the tree trunks, auburn-furred fingers searching out tropical fruit for sustenance. By the end, Hope’s torso was slashed with deep lacerations. Multiple bones were broken. Seventy-four pellets were lodged in her body. Her months-old baby had…

Read More Read More

Environment reporters facing harassment and murder, study finds

Environment reporters facing harassment and murder, study finds

Comments 0 Comment

The Guardian reports: Thirteen journalists who were investigating damage to the environment have been killed in recent years and many more are suffering violence, harassment, intimidation and lawsuits, according to a study. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), which produced the tally, is investigating a further 16 deaths over the last decade. It says the number of murders may be as high as 29, making this field of journalism one of the most dangerous after war reporting. On every continent…

Read More Read More

How American waste crosses the globe and overwhelms the poorest nations

How American waste crosses the globe and overwhelms the poorest nations

Comments 0 Comment

The Guardian reports: What happens to your plastic after you drop it in a recycling bin? According to promotional materials from America’s plastics industry, it is whisked off to a factory where it is seamlessly transformed into something new. This is not the experience of Nguyễn Thị Hồng Thắm, a 60-year-old Vietnamese mother of seven, living amid piles of grimy American plastic on the outskirts of Hanoi. Outside her home, the sun beats down on a Cheetos bag; aisle markers…

Read More Read More

Hundreds of new pesticides approved in Brazil under Bolsonaro

Hundreds of new pesticides approved in Brazil under Bolsonaro

Comments 0 Comment

The Guardian reports: Brazil has approved hundreds of new pesticide products since its far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, took power in January, and more than 1,000 since 2016, a study has found. Many of those approved are banned in Europe. Of 169 new pesticides sanctioned up to 21 May this year, 78 contain active ingredients classified as highly hazardous by the Pesticide Action Network and 24 contain active ingredients banned in the EU, according to the study published on Wednesday by…

Read More Read More

Republican and Democratic former EPA heads sound alarm on Trump administration

Republican and Democratic former EPA heads sound alarm on Trump administration

Comments 0 Comment

Think Progress reports: Former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) officials — including three Republicans and one Democrat — sounded the alarm on Tuesday about the direction of the agency under President Donald Trump. They warned that decades of environmental progress are on the line. Former EPA administrators under the Obama and Reagan administrations, as well as both Bush administrations, shared their concerns during a House Committee on Energy and Commerce hearing. “I am here today because I am deeply concerned that…

Read More Read More

‘Frightening’ number of plant extinctions found in global survey

‘Frightening’ number of plant extinctions found in global survey

Comments 0 Comment

The Guardian reports: Human destruction of the living world is causing a “frightening” number of plant extinctions, according to scientists who have completed the first global analysis of the issue. They found 571 species had definitely been wiped out since 1750 but with knowledge of many plant species still very limited the true number is likely to be much higher. The researchers said the plant extinction rate was 500 times greater now than before the industrial revolution, and this was…

Read More Read More

The end of the Arctic as we know it

The end of the Arctic as we know it

Comments 0 Comment

Jonathan Watts writes: The demise of an entire ocean is almost too enormous to grasp, but as the expedition sails deeper into the Arctic, the colossal processes of breakdown are increasingly evident. The first fragment of ice appears off the starboard bow a few miles before the 79th parallel in the Fram strait, which lies between Greenland and the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. The solitary floe is soon followed by another, then another, then clusters, then swarms, then entire fields…

Read More Read More

Can soil solve the climate crisis?

Can soil solve the climate crisis?

Comments 0 Comment

Kenneth Miller writes: When Rattan Lal was awarded the Japan Prize for Biological Production, Ecology in April—the Asian equivalent of a Nobel—the audience at Tokyo’s National Theatre included the emperor and empress. Lal’s acceptance speech, however, was down-to-earth in the most literal sense. “I’d like to begin, rather unconventionally, with the conclusion of my presentation,” he told the assembled dignitaries. “And the conclusion is four words: In soil we trust.” That statement could serve as the motto for a climate…

Read More Read More

People eat at least 50,000 plastic particles a year, study finds

People eat at least 50,000 plastic particles a year, study finds

Comments 0 Comment

The Guardian reports: The average person eats at least 50,000 particles of microplastic a year and breathes in a similar quantity, according to the first study to estimate human ingestion of plastic pollution. The true number is likely to be many times higher, as only a small number of foods and drinks have been analysed for plastic contamination. The scientists reported that drinking a lot of bottled water drastically increased the particles consumed. The health impacts of ingesting microplastic are…

Read More Read More

Fears grow that ‘nuclear coffin’ is leaking radioactive waste into the Pacific

Fears grow that ‘nuclear coffin’ is leaking radioactive waste into the Pacific

Comments 0 Comment

Trevor Nace writes: The tropical blue skies over the southern Pacific Ocean were enveloped by towering mushroom clouds lingering over the Marshall Islands in 1954 as the United States continued its testing of nuclear weapons. The United States conducted 67 nuclear weapon tests from 1946 to 1958 on the pristine Marshall Islands. The most powerful test was the “Bravo” hydrogen bomb in 1954, which was about 1,000 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. The extensive nuclear…

Read More Read More

Influential panel votes to recognize Earth’s new epoch: The Anthropocene

Influential panel votes to recognize Earth’s new epoch: The Anthropocene

Comments 0 Comment

Nature reports: A panel of scientists voted this week to designate a new geologic epoch — the Anthropocene — to mark the profound ways in which humans have altered the planet. That decision, by the 34-member Anthropocene Working Group (AWG), marks an important step towards formally defining a new slice of the geologic record — an idea that has generated intense debate within the scientific community over the past few years. The panel plans to submit a formal proposal for…

Read More Read More

World’s rivers ‘awash with dangerous levels of antibiotics’

World’s rivers ‘awash with dangerous levels of antibiotics’

Comments 0 Comment

The Guardian reports: Hundreds of rivers around the world from the Thames to the Tigris are awash with dangerously high levels of antibiotics, the largest global study on the subject has found. Antibiotic pollution is one of the key routes by which bacteria are able develop resistance to the life-saving medicines, rendering them ineffective for human use. “A lot of the resistance genes we see in human pathogens originated from environmental bacteria,” said Prof William Gaze, a microbial ecologist at…

Read More Read More